Title: Collusion resistant self-healing key distribution in mobile wireless networks

Authors: Ratna Dutta; Sugata Sanyal

Addresses: Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India. ' School of Technology & Computer Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai 400005, India

Abstract: A fundamental concern of any secure group communication system is key management and wireless environments create new challenges. One core requirement in these emerging networks is self-healing. In systems where users can be offline and miss updates, self-healing allows a user to recover lost session keys and get back into the secure communication without putting extra burden on the group manager. Clearly, self-healing must only be available to authorised users. This paper fixes the problem of collusion attack in an existing self-healing key distribution scheme and provides a highly efficient scheme as compared to the existing works. It is computationally secure, resists collusion attacks made between newly joined users and revoked users and achieves forward and backward secrecy. Our security analysis is in an appropriate security model. Unlike the existing constructions, our scheme does not forbid revoked users from rejoining in later sessions.

Keywords: session key distribution; self-healing; revocation; wireless networks; access structure; network security; forward secrecy; backward secrecy; collusion resistance; mobile networks; secure group communication; collusion attacks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2012.047968

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2012 Vol.5 No.3, pp.228 - 243

Received: 16 Jan 2012
Accepted: 07 Mar 2012
Published online: 11 Jan 2015 *

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