Vol.:(0123456789) Wireless Personal Communications https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-020-07292-4 1 3 Attribute‑Based Authenticated Group Key Transfer Protocol without Pairing Abhimanyu Kumar 1  · Reshu Verma 1 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Group key establishment protocol is the primary requirement of several group-ware applications, like secure conferences, pay per view, collaborative work space that needs to establish a secure session among a group of participants. However, some of the appli- cations often need to establish a secure session among the participants without knowing their actual identities. In such cases, the legitimacy of participants is decided based up on a descriptive set of attributes usually called as access structure. The participants should have sufcient set of attributes to satisfy the access structure, which are to consider as authen- ticated and eligible for the group conversation. This paper introducing an attribute based authenticated group key transfer protocol without using bilinear pairing. Group key man- agement based on attributes gives fne-grained access control over the group of members that are authenticated by the set of attributes. The proposed protocol uses, Shamir Secret Sharing and elliptic curve arithmetic instead of bilinear pairing computations. The mem- bers are authenticated based on the access structure defned by the session initiator. The group key is securely transferred to only those participants, who are authenticated by their attributes. The authentication process of proposed protocol is information theoretically secure, while the key confdentiality relies on the intractability of Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem. Keywords Attribute based authentication · Shamir secret sharing · Elliptic curve arithmetic · Group key exchange · Lagrange interpolation 1 Introduction A group key establishment scheme allows a number of participants to establish a secret common key called group key. Group key is required to establish a secure session via open public network in several group-ware applications like teleconferences, distance * Abhimanyu Kumar abhi.kumar@nituk.ac.in Reshu Verma reshu.verma.cse17@nituk.ac.in 1 Department of Computer Science Engineering, National Institute of Technology Uttarakhand, Srinagar 246174, India