Identity-based secure group communications using pairings

Abstract Identity-based secure group communications are relevant for distributed environments, whenever a group of peers needs to autonomously perform secure interactions in the context of an application, offered as a service by a trusted third party. A ground tool to enable secure group communications is authenticated group key agreement; indeed, once established a group secret key, integrity and confidentiality of group communications can be enforced thanks to symmetric cryptography. In this paper, we discuss the construction and implementation of identity-based signature schemes that make use of bilinear pairing to get shorter signatures, and their application to authenticated group key agreement. Besides the introduction of two new signature schemes, the aim of this contribution would be to show that through such schemes one can get implementations for identity-based secure group communications that scale sufficiently well with respect to the number of involved parties. We run a set of experiments that corroborate our expectations.