A one-round certificateless authenticated group key agreement protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Established in self-organized mode between mobile terminals (MT), mobile Ad Hoc networks are characterized by a fast change of network topology, limited power dissipation of network node, limited network bandwidth and poor security of the network. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient one round certificateless authenticated group key agreement (OR-CLAGKA) protocol to satisfy the security demand of mobile Ad Hoc networks. Based on elliptic curve public key cryptography (ECC), OR-CLAGKA protocol utilizes the assumption of elliptic curve discrete logarithm problems (ECDLP) to guarantee its security. In contrast with those certificateless authenticated group key agreement (GKA) protocols, OR-CLAGKA protocol can reduce protocol data interaction between group users and it is based on efficient ECC public key infrastructure without calculating bilinear pairings, which involves negligible computational overhead. Thus, it is particularly suitable to deploy OR-CLAGKA protocol on MT devices because of its limited computation capacity and power consumption. Also, under the premise of keeping the forward and backward security, OR-CLAGKA protocol has achieved appropriate optimization to improve the performance of Ad Hoc networks in terms of frequent communication interrupt and reconnection. In addition, it has reduced executive overheads of key agreement protocol to make the protocol more suitable for mobile Ad Hoc network applications.