An IBE-Based Authenticated Key Transfer Protocol on Elliptic Curves

Abstract

The key exchanged using key transfer protocols is generally used for symmetric key encryption where this key is known as private key and used for both encryption as well as decryption. As we all know, many key transfer protocols including basic Diffie-Hellman protocol are proposed in the literature. However, many of these key transfer protocols either are proven insecure or had a burden of communication and computational cost. Therefore, a more secure and efficient key transfer protocol is needed. In this article, the author proposes an authenticated key transfer protocol that securely and efficiently negotiates a common session key between two end users. He calls this protocol as IBE-TP-AKE. This proposal is based on the elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) and uses the idea of identity-based encryption (IBE) with pairing. The security of the proposed work is based on the hard problems of elliptic curve and their pairing. Further, the author has shown the security of his proposed protocol and proved it using the security properties discussed later.