A Communication Efficient Group Key Distribution Scheme for MANETs

Abstract

To secure the group communication in wireless ad hoc networks, a group key shared between participants is required. The special nature and the constraints posed by wireless ad hoc networks make the establishment of a group key a challenging task. The execution of a group key distribution scheme must be very carefully designed having in mind both the computation and communication efficiency. In this paper, we propose a communication efficient group key distribution scheme which adopts the Identity Based Broadcast Encryption (IBBE) methodology. No message exchange is required for the suggested scheme to establish a group key when the group members' identities are known to the broadcaster. A highlight of the scheme is that communication overhead remains unchanged as group size grows. In order for the group member to obtain his/her session key, only one bilinear pairing computation is required. Moreover, we show that the new scheme is proved secure in standard model under the truncated q-ABDHE assumption. Thus, the scheme can not only meet security demands but also efficient in terms of computational and communication. Our scheme is tested on a modern station and the experimental results demonstrate its suitability for large scale MANETs.