Non-abelian key agreement protocols Original Research Article

A key-agreement protocol (KAP) is a multi-party algorithm defined by a sequence of steps specifying the actions required for two or more individuals to each obtain a shared secret. A brief introduction to an axiomatic basis for non-abelian KAPs is presented. The security of these protocols is related to the difficulty of solving equations in non-linear algebraic structures. In particular, it is shown that well known hard problems in group theory can be used to generate key agreement protocols. Concrete examples of such KAPs are discussed and the axiomatic method is shown to subsume other braid group KAPs. The paper concludes with a snapshot of methods and examples currently under investigation.