Abstract
With the popularity of group-oriented applications, conference-key agreement protocol has become an important issue for secure communication. Participants can establish a common conference key by conference-key agreement protocol and encrypt/decrypt the transmitted messages among participants over open networks. However, not all of the schemes are secure against malicious participants who want to disrupt the conference key establishment. In order to exclude malicious participants, conference-key agreement protocol with fault-tolerant capability is essential. In this paper, we proposed an efficient and flexible conference-key agreement protocol with fault-tolerant capability. We show that the proposed protocol is not only secure against passive and active adversaries but also provide forward secrecy. Compared with previous works, our protocol are much more flexible and requires lower computation cost.