Identity-based key agreement for peer group communication from pairings

Some cryptographic schemes based on the bilinear pairings were proposed recently. In this paper, we apply the pairings on elliptic curve and Elliptic Curve Cryptography to the key agreement of dynamic peer group. Each member performs authentication and contributes a secret data to negotiate a group common key by means of a binary key tree. The proposed protocol does not need a dedicated central server to perform the key agreement, and the overhead is distributed among the group members. To provide a secure dynamic group communication, the key renewing mechanism has to be included. While the member joins/leaves, the group session key will be renewed to provide the backward/forward privacy, respectively. The key renewing is much efficient because it is only confined to the keys of the key-path. The proposed protocol is flexible while the change of membership is frequent.