An Enhanced Fault-Tolerant Conference Key Agreement Protocol

Establishing a secure communication of Internet conferences for participants is very important. Before starting the conference, all the participants establish a common conference key to encrypt/decrypt communicated messages. It enables participants to exchange the secure messages. Nevertheless, in the conference, if there are any malicious participants who may try to upset the key generation process causing other legal participants to obtain a different conference key. In this article, we propose an improved conference key agreement with fault-tolerant capability. The proposed scheme can filter malicious participants at the beginning of the conference to ensure that all participants obtain the same conference key. Compare with other schemes, our scheme is more secure and efficient than others.

Authors:

• Cheng-Chi Lee
• Chun-Ta Li
• Chia-Ying Wu
• Shiow-Yuan Huang

Keywords:

• Conference key
• Diffie-Hellman protocol
• key agreement
• fault tolerance.

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