A Secure and Efficient Protocol for Group Key agreement in Heterogeneous Environment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new constant-round group key agreement protocol tailored for heterogeneous environments, ensuring security, efficiency, and dynamic group management by leveraging polynomial interpolation and shifting computational load.

Contribution

It presents a novel, efficient, and secure protocol that handles dynamic group changes and is suitable for environments with computationally diverse nodes.

Findings

Significant improvement in protocol efficiency over existing methods

Ensures security under formal analysis

Supports dynamic user join and leave operations

Abstract

Secure group communication in heterogeneous environment is gaining popularity due to the advent of wireless and ubiquitous computing. Although a number of protocols for group key agreement have been proposed, most of them are not applicable in heterogeneous environment where a number of computationally limited nodes coexist with one or more computationally efficient nodes. Among the few existing protocols, where some fail to satisfy the key agreement properties, some are unable to handle the agreement for dynamic group. In this work, we propose a constant round group key agreement protocol for heterogeneous environment using polynomial interpolation. The protocol ensures both communication and computation efficiency by shifting the major computation load on powerful users, achieves true contributory key agreement property and dynamic handling of user join and leave. The security of the protocol has been analyzed under formal model. The comparison result shows considerable improvement in protocol efficiency compared to the existing ones.