A Family of Collusion Resistant Symmetric Key Protocols for Authentication

Abstract

We address the problem of message authentication in communication networks which are resource constrained or are performance bound. Recent research has focused on development of symmetric key protocols for authentication in such networks. In these protocols, the sender generates a pool of keys -used to sign the messages, and distributes a different subset of keys -used to verify the signatures, to each user. However, in these protocols, users can collude to combine their keys and impersonate the sender by generating the sender signatures. In this work, we describe a family of collusion resistant symmetric key distribution protocols for authentication which address the problem of collusion. We show that the collusion resistance achieved using our protocols is practical (and hence, sufficient) for networks whose communication diameter is known or is within fixed bounds. Furthermore, we show that some existing protocols in literature are members of our family of protocols.