An improved two-party identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol using pairings

Two-party authenticated key agreement protocols using pairings have gained much attention in the cryptographic community. Several protocols of this type where proposed in the past of which many were found to be flawed. This resulted in attacks or the inability to conform to security attributes. In this paper, we propose an efficient identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol employing pairings which employs a variant of a signature scheme and conforms to security attributes. Additionally, existing competitive and the proposed protocol are compared regarding efficiency and security. The criteria for efficiency are defined in this paper, whereas the criteria for security are defined by the fulfilment of security attributes from literature. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.