Energy‐Efficient Identity and ECC‐Based Session Key Agreement Protocol for Secure Communication in Wireless Networks

In groupware applications, group members establish a secure session by creating a common group key, which is a major requirement to provide secure group communication in groupware applications, such as group messaging, especially with lightweight wireless devices with limited resources. The security of the group is the main concern. Most of the existing protocols in the literature that used a tree‐based structure created a common key but failed to provide an important security feature, that is, authentication. Moreover, a large number of expensive modular exponentiation operations are required using these protocols, creating unnecessary delay. In this paper, we present a hybrid identity and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)‐based session key agreement protocol for secure group communication in wireless networks, especially with energy‐constrained wireless devices. An identity‐based bilinear pairing‐free cryptosystem is used to provide fast authentication. Further, a queue‐based design in place of a tree‐based design is used to generate the common group, thereby avoiding the overhead associated with maintaining tree balance and enhancing overall performance. The proposed protocol eliminates exponentiation and minimizes superfluous delays and member variation in the critical key calculation process, employing an efficient cryptosystem using an elliptic curve without expensive pairing operations, which makes it effective for use in lightweight wireless devices with limited resources, ranging from small IoT devices to extensive networked infrastructures. Furthermore, a comparative assessment of communication and computational complexities with related protocols shows that our approach achieves improved efficiency, exhibiting minimal computational complexity during member leave operation. Finally, the protocol is simulated using the AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocol and Applications) tool, which verifies that it is safe from different kinds of attacks.