Pairing free asymmetric group key agreement protocol

More and more applications are nowadays distributed and rely on collaborative input. Group key protocols, enabling the construction of a common shared key, are the most evident primitive to efficiently provide the required authentication and confidentiality in the group. Asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) protocols allow the construction of a common shared public key, where only the participants in the group possessing different private keys are able to decrypt messages encrypted by means of this group public key. Up to now, all the proposed AGKA protocols in literature rely on compute intensive pairing operations, which are too highly demanding for resource constrained devices. We propose in this paper a one-round lightweight elliptic curve based alternative, being able to offer in addition also self-certification to the members of the group due to the usage of Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone certificates. We show drastic improvements with respect to both communication and computation costs, compared to the pairing based approaches.