Multi-group key agreement protocol using secret sharing scheme

The group key agreement protocol allows a group of participants to agree on a one time session key and use it to protect future group oriented communication across an insecure network. In literature, secret sharing schemes, bilinear pairings, and polynomials were commonly used to distribute group key related information to the group participants. However, all these schemes work only for a single group but not for multiple groups. Hence, we propose a multi-group key agreement protocol based on a secret sharing scheme in this paper. This scheme is relevant in scenarios where groups are the most elementary entities for communication as opposed to individuals. Any threshold t or more participants could reconstruct the secret in every group. If there are t − 1 or fewer participants in any group, the secret cannot be obtained in those particular groups. The correctness of the scheme and security analysis are discussed. Copyright © 2023 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.