Efficient Pairing-Free, Certificateless Two-Party Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Grid Computing

The most prevalent grid security standard, grid security infrastructure uses an authentication protocol based on public key infrastructure (PKI). Certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) overcomes PKI certificate management problems and is well aligned with grid computing demands. Security and efficiency are the main grid authentication protocol objectives. Practical, efficient CL-PKC-based authentication protocols for real grid environments is widely acknowledged as a challenging issue. Unfortunately, certificateless authenticated key agreement protocols rely on bilinear pairings, which are extremely computational expensive. In this paper, we present a novel pairing-free certificateless two-party authenticated grid key agreement (GPC-AKA) protocol, providing a lighter weight key management approach for grid users. We then propose the first practical GPC-AKA implementation as a proof of concept. We also compare the efficiency of GPC-AKA to other proposed work in the literature.