A revocable ID-based authenticated group key exchange protocol with resistant to malicious participants

Authenticated group key exchange (AGKE) protocol provides secure group communications for participants in cooperative and distributed applications over open network environments such as the Internet and wireless networks. In the past, a number of AGKE protocols based on the identity (ID)-based public key system (IDPKS) have been proposed, called ID-AGKE protocols. In the IDPKS system, users’ identities are viewed as the public keys to eliminate certificate management of the traditional certificate-based public key system. Nevertheless, any certificate-based public key systems or IDPKS systems must provide a revocation mechanism to revoke misbehaving/compromised users from the public key systems. However, there was little work on studying the revocation problem of the IDPKS system. Quite recently, Tseng and Tsai presented a new ID-based encryption scheme and its associated revocation mechanism to solve the revocation problem efficiently, called revocable ID-based public key system (R-IDPKS). In this paper, we follow Tseng and Tsai’s R-IDPKS system to propose the first revocable ID-AGKE (RID-AGKE) protocol. Security analysis is made to demonstrate that the proposed RID-AGKE protocol is a provably secure AGKE protocol and can resist malicious participants. As compared to the recently proposed ID-AGKE protocols, the proposed RID-AGKE protocol is provably secure and has better performance while providing an efficient revocation mechanism.