An Escrow-Free Two-party Identity-based Key Agreement Protocol without Using Pairings for Distinct PKGs

Abstract

Key escrow is a default property that is inherent in identity-based cryptography, where a curious private key generator (PKG) can derive a secret value shared by communicating entities in its domain. Therefore, a dishonest PKG can encrypt and decrypt ciphers or can carry out any attack on the communicating parties. Of course, the escrow property is not completely unwanted but is acceptable in other particular applications. On the other hand, in more civil applications, this key escrow property is undesirable and needs to be removed to provide maximum communication privacy. Therefore, this paper presents an escrow-free identity-based key agreement protocol that is also applicable even in a distinct PKG condition that does not use pairings. The proposed protocol has comparable computational and communicational performance to many other protocols with similar security attributes, of which their security is based on costly bilinear pairings. The protocol’s notion was inspired by McCullagh et al. and Chen-Kudla, in regard to escrow-free and multi-PKG key agreement ideas. In particular, the scheme captures perfect forward secrecy and key compromise impersonation resilience, which were lacking in McCullagh et al.’s study, as well as all other desirable security attributes, such as known key secrecy, unknown key-share resilience and no-key control. The merit in the proposed protocol is the achievement of all required security requirements with a relatively lower computational overhead than many other protocols because it precludes pairings.