Efficient, anonymous, and authenticated conference key setup in cellular wireless networks

Conference call is a key functionality that a wireless network should support. When a conference call is set up in a wireless network, conference attendees should be authenticated. In many applications, the attendees also need to be anonymous. In this paper, we propose a very efficient protocol for authenticated and anonymous conference key setup. Our protocol uses only symmetric-key encryptions/decryptions and hashing and is thus much faster than any existing protocol using public-key cryptography. In addition to the conference key setup protocol, we also present two protocols, for authenticated call setup and authenticated handoff, respectively. These two protocols are also much faster than existing protocols based on public-key cryptography. Consequently, a system using the three protocols presented in this paper will have both high security and high efficiency.