Secure Collaborative Key Management for Dynamic Groups in Mobile Networks

Abstract

Mobile networks are composed of heterogeneous mobile devices with peer-to-peer wireless communication. Their dynamic and self-organizing natures pose security challenge. We consider secure group key management for peer dynamic groups in mobile wireless networks. Many group based applications have achieved remarkable growth along with increasing use of multicast based services. The key sharing among the group members is an important issue for secure group communication because the communication for many participants implies that the likelihood of illegal overhearing increases. We propose a group key sharing scheme and efficient rekeying methods for frequent membership changes from network dynamics. The proposed method enables the group members to simply establish a group key and provide high flexibility for dynamic group changes such as member join or leave and group merging or partition. We conduct mathematical evaluation with other group key management protocols and finally prove its security by demonstrating group key secrecy, backward and forward secrecy, key independence, and implicit key authentication under the decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption.