Contributory group key agreement protocols, revisited for mobile ad-hoc groups

Abstract

Security of various group-oriented applications for mobile ad-hoc groups requires a group secret shared between all participants. Contributory group key agreement (CGKA) protocols, originally designed for peer groups in localand wide-area wired networks, can also be used in ad-hoc scenarios because of the similar security requirements and trust relationship between participants that excludes any trusted central authority (e.g., a group manager) from the computation of the group key. We revise original protocols from the perspective of the mobile ad-hoc communication, classify mobile ad-hoc groups based on the performance of involved mobile devices, specify trust relationship between participants, propose further optimizations to original protocols to achieve better communication, computation and memory complexities