Provable Secure Pairing-Free Certificate-Less Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol

Security and efficiency are the main grid authentication protocols objectives. Practical efficient certificate-less public key cryptography-based authentication protocol is widely acknowledged as a challenging issue in grid computing environment. Unfortunately, certificate-less authenticated key agreement protocols rely on bilinear pairing that is extremely computational expensive. A recently published protocol claims meeting some attacks, however, there are some shortcomings in such a protocol. In this paper, such a competing protocol is mathematically criticized. Then, a secure and efficient grid pairing-free certificate-less two-party authenticated key agreement protocol is proposed for grid computing. Finally, the proposed protocol is mathematically proved as secure and efficient in the Lippold model, a very strong security model, under the gap Diffie-Hellman assumption.