Dynamic group key agreement for resource-constrained devices using blockchains

Abstract

Dynamic group key agreement (DGKA) protocols are one of the key security primitives to secure multiparty communications in decentralized and insecure environments while considering the instant changes in a communication group. However, with the ever-increasing number of connected devices, traditional DGKA protocols have performance challenges since each member in the group has to make several computationally intensive operations while verifying the keying materials to compute the resulting group key. To overcome this issue, we propose a new approach for DGKA protocols by utilizing Hyperledger Fabric framework as a blockchain platform. To this end, we migrate the communication and verification overhead of DGKA participants to the blockchain network in our developed scheme. This paradigm allows a flexible DGKA protocol that considers resource-constrained entities and trade-offs regarding distributed computation. According to our performance analysis, participants with low computing resources can efficiently utilize our protocol. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that our protocol has the same security features as other comparable protocols in the literature