Simulatable certificateless two-party authenticated key agreement protocol

Abstract: Key agreement (KA) allows two or more users to negotiate a secret session key among them over an open network. Authenticated key agreement (AKA) is a KA protocol enhanced to prevent active attacks. AKA can be achieved using a public-key infrastructure (PKI) 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, certificateless cryptography was introduced to mitigate these limitations. In this paper, we first propose a security model for AKA protocols using certificateless cryptography. Following this model, we then propose a simulatable certificateless two-party AKA protocol. Security is proven under the standard computational Diffie–Hellman (CDH) and bilinear Diffie–Hellman (BDH) assumptions. Our protocol is efficient and practical, because it requires only one pairing operation and five multiplications by each party. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]