A provable authenticated certificateless group key agreement with constant rounds

Group key agreement protocols allow a group of users, communicating over a public network, to establish a shared secret key to achieve a cryptographic goal. Protocols based on certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) are preferred since CL-PKC does not need certificates to guarantee the authenticity of public keys and does not suffer from key escrow of identity-based cryptography. Most previous certificateless group key agreement protocols deploy signature schemes to achieve authentication and do not have constant rounds. No security model has been presented for group key agreement protocols based on CL-PKC. This paper presents a security model for a certificateless group key agreement protocol and proposes a constant-round group key agreement pro- tocol based on CL-PKC. The proposed protocol does not involve any signature scheme, which increases the efficiency of the protocol. It is formally proven that the proposed protocol provides strong AKE-security and tolerates up to n-2 malicious insiders for weak MA-security. The protocol also resists key control attack under a weak corruption model.