Analysis and Improvement on a Contributory Group Key Exchange Protocol Based on the Diffie-Hellman Technique

In 2008, based on the two-party Diffie–Hellman technique, Biswas proposed a contributory group key exchange protocol called the Group-DH protocol. This contributory property is an important one of group key agreement. Unfortunately, in this paper we show that the proposed Group-DH protocol is not a contributory group key exchange protocol. Therefore, we propose an improved group key exchange protocol with verifiably contributory property based on the same Diffie–Hellman technique. When an identical group key is constructed, each participant can confirm that his/her contribution is actually included in the group key. We show that the improved protocol is provably secure against passive attacks under the decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption. As compared to the previously proposed group key exchange protocols, our protocol provides contributiveness and the required computational cost is suitable for low-power participants in a network environment.