Efficient three-party authenticated key agreement protocol in certificateless cryptography

Key agreement protocols are multi-party protocols in which entities exchange public information allowing them to create a common secret key that is known only to those entities and which cannot be predetermined by any party. Key agreement can be achieved using a public key infrastructure or identity-based cryptography. However, the former suffers from a heavy certificate management burden, while the latter is subject to the so-called key escrow problem. Recently, the notion of certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) was introduced to mitigate these limitations. In this paper, we introduce the notion of three-party authenticated key agreement into CL-PKC and propose a concrete certificateless three-party authenticated key agreement protocol. We show that the proposed protocol is secure (i.e. conforms to defined security attributes) while being efficient.