Computationally secure self-healing key distribution with revocation in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel self-healing technique for key distribution with revocation and demonstrates how it improves the efficiency over the previous approaches while using the existing idea of secret sharing or revocation polynomial in designing self-healing key distribution schemes with revocation. Unlike the existing approaches, our self-healing mechanism does not need to send the history of revoked users and consequently enables better performance gain over the previous approaches in terms of storage, communication and computation complexity. We propose and analyze a generalized self-healing key distribution using a vector space access structure in order to reach more flexible performance of the scheme. We describe three efficient constructions for scalable self-healing key distribution with t-revocation capability. We provide a rigorous treatment of the security of our constructions in an appropriate security framework and show that they are computationally secure and achieve both forward and backward secrecy.