An efficient conference key agreement protocol suited for resource constrained devices

Abstract

Conference key agreement (CKA) is essential for securing communication in group-oriented scenarios like multi-party messaging and collaborative environments. While elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) offers efficiency and strong security, ECC-based CKA protocols often rely on expensive pairings, making them computationally impractical for deployment over the resource limited devices. This paper introduces a novel CKA approach using ECC without requiring pairing computations, thus addressing scalability and efficiency challenges. The proposed protocol employs scalar point multiplications over a prime field elliptic curve group, enabling secure and efficient CKA operations with reduced computational overhead. Compared to existing ECC-based key agreement protocols, it minimizes user-level computation and enhances performance in computational efficiency, communication overhead, and security strength. Particularly suitable for resource-constrained environments like IoT and edge computing, where computational resources are limited yet secure group communication is crucial.