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ACM Computing Surveys

A Survey of Group Key Agreement Protocols with Constant Rounds

Hu Xiong, Yan Xuan Wu, Zhenyu Lu

Published Jun 18, 2019• 31 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Group key agreement (shorten as GKA) protocol enables a group of users to negotiate a one-time session key and protect the thereafter group-oriented communication with this session key across an unreliable network. The number of communication rounds is one of the main concern for practical applications where the cardinality of group participants involved is considerable. It is critical to have fixed constant rounds in GKA protocols to secure these applications. In light of overwhelming variety and multitude of constant-round GKA protocols, this article surveys these protocols from a series of perspectives to supply better comprehension for researchers and scholars. Concretely, this article captures the state of the art of constant-round GKA protocols by analyzing the design rationale, examining the framework and security model, and evaluating all discussed protocols in terms of efficiency and security properties. In addition, this article discusses the extension of constant-round GKA protocols including dynamic membership updating, password-based, affiliation-hiding, and fault-tolerance. In conclusion, this article also points out a number of interesting future directions.

DOI
10.1145/3318460

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The scope of this paper is to review and evaluate all constant round Group Key Agreement (GKA) protocols proposed so far in the literature. We have gathered all GKA protocols that require 1,2,3,4 a...

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Group key agreement (shorten as GKA) protocol enables a group of users to negotiate a one-time session key and protect the thereafter group-oriented communication with this session key across an unreliable network. The number of communication rounds is one of the main concern for practical applications where the cardinality of group participants involved is considerable. It is critical to have fixed constant rounds in GKA protocols to secure these applications. In light of overwhelming variety and multitude of constant-round GKA protocols, this article surveys these protocols from a series of perspectives to supply better comprehension for researchers and scholars. Concretely, this article captures the state of the art of constant-round GKA protocols by analyzing the design rationale, examining the framework and security model, and evaluating all discussed protocols in terms of efficiency and security properties. In addition, this article discusses the extension of constant-round GKA protocols including dynamic membership updating, password-based, affiliation-hiding, and fault-tolerance. In conclusion, this article also points out a number of interesting future directions.
The last decade has witnessed a sharp spike in the popularity of group applications, such as multi-media conferencing, collaborative workspaces, as well as dynamic coalitions common in law enforcement and disaster rescue scenarios. Standard security services required in such group settings (such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication) can be efficiently achieved if all group members share a secret key. A group key agreement protocol (GKA) provide a technique for any set of participating players to collaboratively establish a shared key. In this thesis, we tackle two challenging issues in GKA: robustness and privacy-preserving authentication. Robustness improves performance by guaranteeing completion of GKA protocols despite participating player or communication failures. Affiliation-hiding authenticated GKA prevents from man-in-the-middle-attacks by authenticating players in a privacy-preserving manner. We propose a two-round group key agreement protocol, which offers a natural trade-off between message size and the desired level of fault-tolerance. We demonstrate that in a realistic setting of random player faults, the new protocol has logarithmic-sized messages and expected round complexity close to two. We generalize a robust group key agreement protocol to support heterogeneous players for a general environment. We prove the security of the proposed protocols under the standard cryptographic assumptions. We present the formal definition of the affiliation-hiding GKA in a standard PKI model with re-usable certificates. The model includes strong security properties, called perfect forward secrecy (PFS) and linkable affiliation-hiding (LAH)—that an key agreement protocol might provide in the face of player corruptions and session compromises. We construct two variants of optimal-cost AH-AGKA protocols, which satisfy PFS and LAH notions under the standard cryptographic assumptions in the random oracle model. The protocol yields minimal costs: three rounds of interaction matches the round complexity of non-private PFS authenticated GKA and its computation costs are comparable to the cost of unauthenticated GKA.
Modern collaborative and group-oriented applications typically involve communications over open networks. Given the openness of today's networks, communications among group members must be secure and, at the same time, efficient. Group key agreement (GKA) is widely employed for secure group communications in modern collaborative and group-oriented applications. This paper studies the problem of GKA in identity-based cryptosystems with an emphasis on round-efficient, sender-unrestricted, member-dynamic, and provably secure key escrow freeness. The problem is resolved by proposing a one-round dynamic asymmetric GKA protocol which allows a group of members to dynamically establish a public group encryption key, while each member has a different secret decryption key in an identity-based cryptosystem. Knowing the group encryption key, any entity can encrypt to the group members so that only the members can decrypt. We construct this protocol with a strongly unforgeable stateful identity-based batch multisignature scheme. The proposed protocol is shown to be secure under the k -bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent assumption.
A robust group key agreement protocol (GKA) allows a set of players to establish a shared secret key, regardless of network/node failures. Current constant-round GKA protocols are either efficient and nonrobust or robust but not efficient; assuming a reliable broadcast communication medium, the standard encryption-based group key agreement protocol can be robust against arbitrary number of node faults, but the size of the messages broadcast by every player is proportional to the number of players. In contrast, nonrobust group key agreement can be achieved with each player broadcasting just constant-sized messages. We propose a novel 2-round group key agreement protocol, which tolerates up to T node failures, using O(T)-sized messages for any T. We show that the new protocol implies a fully-robust group key agreement with logarithmic-sized messages and expected round complexity close to 2, assuming random node faults. The protocol can be extended to withstand malicious insiders at small constant factor increases in bandwidth and computation. The proposed protocol is secure under the (standard) Decisional Square Diffie-Hellman assumption.
A group key agreement protocol provides a set of users with a shared secret key to achieve cryptographic goal. When membership changes, group session key should be updated efficiently and securely. Hence, dynamic group key agreement protocols are of practical significance. Identity-based group key agreement protocols are preferred to certificate-based ones since identity-based protocols can simplify public key management procedure. Most of previous dynamic group key agreement protocols need at least two rounds to establish or refresh group session keys. In this paper, an identity-based dynamic authenticated group key agreement (DAGKA) protocol is presented. It is round-optimal, since: 1) in setup and join algorithms, only one round of communication is required; 2) in leave algorithm, there is no message exchange among group members. Joining members cannot compute previous session keys and leaving members cannot compute subsequent session keys. The protocol is provably secure. Its AKE-security is proved under decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption. In addition, the protocol resists key control attack and achieves forward security.
A group key agreement protocol provides a set of users with a shared secret key to achieve cryptographic goal. When membership changes, group session key should be updated efficiently and securely. Hence, dynamic group key agreement protocols are of practical significance. Identity-based group key agreement protocols are preferred to certificate-based ones since identity-based protocols can simplify public key management procedure. Most of previous dynamic group key agreement protocols need at least two rounds to establish or refresh group session keys. In this paper, an identity-based dynamic authenticated group key agreement (DAGKA) protocol is presented. It is round-optimal, since: 1) in setup and join algorithms, only one round of communication is required; 2) in leave algorithm, there is no message exchange among group members. Joining members cannot compute previous session keys and leaving members cannot compute subsequent session keys. The protocol is provably secure. Its AKE-security is proved under decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption. In addition, the protocol resists key control attack and achieves forward security.