A Pairing-free Certificateless Authenticated Group Key Agreement for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

The mobile Ad Hoc network is widely used in fields without communication infrastructure. To meet the demand for highly secure and efficient group communication in Ad Hoc network, many contributory group key agreement protocols have been proposed. But most of these proposed protocols focused on security with bilinear pairing calculation, which is a computational-heavy operation. In this paper, a pairing-free certificateless authenticated group key agreement is proposed. By using scalar multiplication of elliptic curves and a binary key tree structure, the proposed protocol reduces computation overhead and meanwhile provides secure services for dynamic groups. The result demonstrates that the protocol is secure, efficient and suitable for Ad Hoc network.