An efficient fault-tolerant group key agreement protocol

Group key agreement (GKA) is a mechanism important for establishing a session key used to encrypt and/or decrypt sensitive messages transmitted to an intended group of receivers in an open network. An efficient group key agreement protocol capable of fault-tolerance named efficient GKA (EGKA) is proposed in this paper. EGKA is not only resistant to DoS attacks, replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks and common modulus attacks but also achieves forward secrecy. The efficiency analysis shows that EGKA is more efficient than previous fault-tolerant GKA protocols mentioned in our paper. Moreover, the long-term keys of participants can be reused which reduce the computational burden of the server. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.