An efficient and non-interactive hierarchical key agreement protocol

The non-interactive identity-based key agreement schemes are believed to be applicable to mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) that have a hierarchical structure such as hierarchical military MANETs. It was observed by Gennaro et al. (2008) that there is still an open problem on the security of the existing schemes, i.e., how to achieve the desirable security against corrupted nodes in the higher levels of a hierarchy? In this paper, we propose a novel and very efficient non-interactive hierarchical identity-based key agreement scheme that solves the open problem and outperforms all existing schemes in terms of computational efficiency and data storage.