An authenticated group key agreement for wireless networks

One useful application of wireless networks is for secure group communication. The members in the group first run a group key agreement (GKA) protocol to establish a common group key that can be used to encrypt messages to be broadcast to the group. Authentication is necessary in GKA protocols to prevent adversaries from masquerading as group members and obtaining the group key. One way of providing authentication is to sign all the messages sent and verify all the messages received; some other techniques may require an extra round of communications. We propose a more efficient authenticated GKA protocol that does not increase the number of communication rounds and is based on the Schnorr signature scheme and the Burmester-Desmedt (BD) GKA protocol. The proposed protocol requires only one signature generation and one signature verification for each member, regardless of the group size.