Paper 2007/313

Perfect Forward Secure Identity-Based Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol in the Escrow Mode

Shengbao Wang, Zhenfu Cao, Zhaohui Cheng, and Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

Abstract

There are several essential features in key agreement protocols such as key escrow (essential when confidentiality, audit trail and legal interception are required) and perfect forward secrecy (i.e., the security of a session key established between two or more entities is guaranteed even when the private keys of the entities are compromised). Majority of the existing escrowable identity-based key agreement protocols, however, only provide partial forward secrecy. Therefore, such protocols are unsuitable for real-word applications that require a stronger sense of forward secrecy --- perfect forward secrecy. In this paper, we propose an efficient perfect forward secure identity-based key agreement protocol in the escrow mode. We prove the security of our protocol in the random oracle model, assuming the intractability of the Gap Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (GBDH) problem. Security proofs are invaluable tools in assuring protocol implementers about the security properties of protocols. We note, however, that many existing security proofs of previously published identity-based protocols entail lengthy and complicated mathematical proofs. In this paper, our proof adopts a modular approach and, hence, simpler to follow.