An Efficient Authenticated Group Key Agreement Protocol with Dynamic Batch Verification for Secure Distributed Networks

Distributed networks have attracted numerous attention since it was proposed. Most existing works mainly focus on the design and improvement of the structure of distributed networks but ignore the secure transmission of the data. In this paper, we mainly concentrate on how to securely and efficiently aggregate the data in a group manner. In particular, an authenticated group key agreement protocol is proposed for secure data transmission in distributed networks. In order to release the computational overhead of distributed nodes, a semi-trusted authority (STA) is introduced to assist the distributed nodes to do some precomputation. When introducing the STA, the collusion attack that may be derived from the STA and attackers is considered, followed by the corresponding countermeasures. Moreover, to overcome the predominantly distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, a dynamic batch verification mechanism is devised. The presented dynamic batch verification mechanism guarantees that the proposed protocol can be run properly among legitimate nodes regardless of the existence of nodes who suffered from the DDoS attack.