Scalable Group Key Agreement using Key Tree in Mobile Environment

This paper proposes an efficient group key agreement protocol in a mobile environment where group members frequently join and leave. This protocol consists of basic protocols and general ones and is expected to be suitable for communications between a mobile device with limited computing capability and a key distributing center (or base station) with sufficient computing capability. Compared with other schemes, the performance of the proposed protocol is a bit more efficient in the aspects of the overall cost for both communication and computation where the computational efficiency of the scheme is achieved by using exclusive or operations and a one-way hash function. Also, in the aspect of security, it guarantees both forward and backward secrecy based on the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption so that secure group communication can be made possible.