An efficient certificate-based authenticated key agreement protocol without bilinear pairing

Abstract

An authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol is extremely essential to secure communications over insecure public networks. It enables the communication parties to securely set up a shared session key in present of the malicious attackers. Certificate-based cryptography (CBC) is a novel public-key cryptographic primitive that has many attractive merits. It solves the certificate revocation problem in conventional public-key cryptography and the key-escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. Until now, four AKA protocols have been proposed in the setting of CBC. However, all of them adopt the costly bilinear pairings and are not suitable for the devices which have limited computing resources and battery power. Therefore, it is interesting and worthwhile to design a certificate-based AKA protocol without using the bilinear pairings. In this paper, we develop a pairing-free certificate-based AKA protocol. The proposed protocol is proven secure under the classic computational Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Compared with the previous pairing-based certificate-based AKA protocols, the proposed protocol enjoys obvious advantage in the computation efficiency.