Key management with host mobility in dynamic groups

Abstract

Key management, which is an important building bloc in securing group communications, has received a particular attention in both academic and industry research communities. This is due to the economical relevance of group-based applications. The key management concerns the distribution and updates of the key material each time a member joins or leaves the group. The dynamic aspect of group applications due to free membership joins and leaves in addition to members' mobility makes difficult the design of efficient and scalable key management protocols. In this paper, we propose a new key management protocol to secure group communications where we consider the mobility of nodes in a mobile environment with a null rekeying cost. Protocol simulations show that our protocol achieves better performance in terms of rekeying.