A Secure and Efficient Group Key Agreement for Ad Hoc Networks

We consider the problem of group key agreement among n parties communicating over an insecure ad hoc network. Firstly, we analyze the state and the problem of existing group key management schemes, and then present a secure, efficient and contributory group key management scheme, which is based on elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC). The security of our scheme relies on the hardness of elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). Compared to existing approaches, our scheme attaches more importance to cost fairness among group members. With this protocol, it takes less computation cost as well as communication cost to construct a secure group key, the low memory cost is also a virtue of our scheme.