Abstract
Key agreement protocols are multi-party protocols in which entities exchange public information allowing them to create a common secret key that is known only to those entities and which cannot be predetermined by any party. Key agreement can be achieved using a public key infrastructure or identity-based cryptography. However, the former suffers from a heavy certificate management burden, while the latter is subject to the so-called key escrow problem. Recently, the notion of certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) was introduced to mitigate these limitations. In this paper, we introduce the notion of three-party authenticated key agreement into CL-PKC and propose a concrete certificateless three-party authenticated key agreement protocol. We show that the proposed protocol is secure (i.e. conforms to defined security attributes) while being efficient.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61003230 and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant No. 20100480130.