An Identity-Based Key Agreement Protocol for the Network Layer

A new identity-based key agreement protocol designed to operate on the network layer is presented. Endpoint addresses, namely IP and MAC addresses, are used as public keys to authenticate the communication devices involved in a key agreement, which allows us to piggyback much of the security overhead for key management to the existing network infrastructure. The proposed approach offers solutions to some of the open problems of identity-based key agreement schemes when applied to the network layer, namely multi-domain key generation, key distribution, multi-domain public parameter distribution, inter-domain key agreement and network address translation traversal.