Constructing UC Secure and Constant-Round Group Key Exchange Protocols via Secret Sharing

Abstract

Group key exchange (GKE) is one of the basic building blocks in securing group communication. A number of solutions to GKE problem have been proposed, but most of them are not scalable and require a number of rounds linear with the number of group members. We present a method of constructing constant-round and identity-based protocol via secret sharing for GKE within universally composability (UC) framework. The resultant protocol focuses on round efficiency and three rounds of communication are required. The protocol allows the batch verification of messages signed by all other group participants. Moreover, compared with other identity-based protocols, the key generation center (KGC) in our protocol is not always online.