An Implementation of Secure Group Communication in a Wireless Environment

Abstract

In recent years, group based applications and protocols have gradually gained popularity in term of data traffic distribution across a group of members. Since these applications typically involve communication over open networks, security has become an important requirement. An efficient key management is able to provide confidentiality and integrity of data exchange between group members. This paper is focused to deploy a group key management scheme which is appropriate for wireless environment. From our studies on the existing group key management schemes, decentralized approach is chosen as a desired architecture. The components and their roles, as well as protocols involved in this architecture are described in detail. An implementation of the proposed approach is conducted on mobile devices using Java 2 Mobile Edition (J2ME) while Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) is used to enable the communication between key management servers and mobile devices. Different aspects of the proposed scheme in particular the join and leave operations including updating of key materials are then tested and discussed.