(In)Security of Efficient Tree-Based Group Key Agreement Using Bilinear Map

A group key agreement protocol enables three or more parties to agree on a secret group key to allow for communication of secret messages between them. In this paper, we consider the security of an efficiency-improved version of the tree-based group key agreement protocol using bilinear maps proposed by Lee et al., and claimed to reduce computational costs while preserving security. To be precise, we show several attacks on this protocol and discuss how they could have been avoided.