Group key agreement for secure group communication in dynamic peer systems

Self-organizing group key agreement protocols without a centralized administrator are essential to secure group communication in dynamic peer systems. In this paper, we propose a generic construction of a one-round self-organizing group key agreement protocol based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem. In the proposed construction, all group members contribute their own public keys to negotiate a shared encryption public key, which corresponds to all different decryption keys. Using his/her own secret key, each group member is able to decrypt any ciphertext encrypted by the shared encryption key. Following the generic construction, we instantiate a one-round self-organizing group key agreement protocol using the efficient and computationally inexpensive public key cryptosystem NTRU. Both the public key and the message in this protocol are secure against the known lattice attacks. Furthermore, we also briefly describe another concrete scheme with our generic idea, based on the ElGamal public key cryptosystem.

► We propose a generic construction of a one-round self-organizing group key agreement scheme based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem.
► We instantiate a one-round self-organizing group key agreement protocol using the efficient public key cryptosystem NTRU.
► We briefly describe another concrete scheme based on the ElGamal public key cryptosystem with our generic idea.