Group key agreement protocol for heterogeneous cryptographic algorithm IoT devices
Junxiao Yang, Guishan Dong, Dong Liu +2 more
With the explosive growth in the number of IoT devices, the security of group communication has become a critical issue requiring urgent solutions. However, existing group key agreement protocols typically assume that all devices employ the same cryptographic algorithm, making them difficult to adapt to the heterogeneous environment prevalent in actual deployments where traditional cryptography and post-quantum cryptography devices coexist. Therefore, this paper proposes a group key agreement protocol that supports devices with heterogeneous algorithms, such as post-quantum devices (Kyber) and traditional devices (ECDH), to collaboratively perform key agreement within the same group. The protocol is based on the Abdalla compiler, groups devices according to their algorithm type, and introduces group leader nodes that support multiple algorithms simultaneously. The protocol adds only two rounds of interaction compared to the underlying two-party protocol, offering strong compatibility and manageable overhead. Security analysis shows that the security of the protocol can be reduced to the security of the underlying two-party protocols. Performance evaluation results indicate that, compared to existing schemes, this protocol achieves averagely 49% computational and 17.5% communication efficiency in mixed-device scenarios, making it suitable for resource-constrained IoT environments.
IET conference proceedings.•Aug 1, 2026•0 citations