A Conference Key Agreement Protocol for Mobile Environment

In recent times, the popularity of group oriented applications such as electronic conferences and collaboration works have increased manifold. Security is crucial for such collaborative applications which operate in a dynamic network environment and communicate over insecure networks such as internet. The design of secure conference key establishment protocol is essential to provide security to such group applications. Most security protocols currently available in the literature are not fully applicable to wireless environment involving low power mobile devices. Few protocols that have been proposed for wireless environment also lack important security properties and formal proof. One such important property is truly contributory key agreement that has not been addressed previously. In this work we propose a new conference key agreement protocol for mobile environment which addresses the truly contributory property and assures users about their participation in the key computation. The design of the protocol is based on polynomial interpolation. We demonstrate that the protocol is provably secure against active adversaries. The performance analysis of the proposed protocol shows that its well suited for mobile environment.