A Practical Secure Chaos-Based Group Key Agreement Protocol Suitable for Distributed Network Environment

[[abstract]]Group key agreement is an important security mechanism for distributed communications, in which it can provide a specific environment for people located at different places to contribute each one’s secret to establish a final session key over an insecure channel. Recently, Guo and Zhang proposed a new protocol that satisfied the requirements of a group key agreement in terms of a chaotic cryptosystem. However, Guo and Zhang’s protocol cannot comply with the mechanism for group key agreement even if it has a contributory nature inside, and it cannot protect the security when off-line guessing attacks occur. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a novel, practical protocol that meets the realistic requirements of group key agreement based on Chebyshev chaotic maps and resists several types of attacks. We believe that our proposed protocol is efficient, secure, and suitable for distributed networks for collaborative group communications