Secure Group Communication Protocol Research Articles

Quantum Secure Group Communication

We propose a quantum secure group communication protocol for the purpose of sharing the same message among multiple authorized users. Our protocol can remove the need for key management that is needed for the quantum network built on quantum key distribution. Comparing with the secure quantum network based on BB84, we show our protocol is more efficient and securer. Particularly, in the security analysis, we introduce a new way of attack, i.e., the counterfactual quantum attack, which can steal information by “invisible” photons. This invisible photon can reveal a single-photon detector in the photon path without triggering the detector. Moreover, the photon can identify phase operations applied to itself, thereby stealing information. To defeat this counterfactual quantum attack, we propose a quantum multi-user authorization system. It allows us to precisely control the communication time so that the attack can not be completed in time.

Sender dynamic, non-repudiable, privacy-preserving and strong secure group communication protocol

Establishing a secure communication channel among a group of individuals is a critical issue in group oriented applications. In implementation, besides the basic confidentiality requirement, we also expect the group communications to be sender dynamic, forward secure, non-repudiable and privacy preserving. Traditional approaches, i.e., group key agreement and broadcast encryption cannot achieve the above requirements simultaneously and efficiently. In this paper, we propose our solution to secure group communications using a new security tool called identity based asymmetric group key agreement protocol with sender non-reputation and privacy. The new notion allows a group of users to negotiate a common group encryption key and their respective group decryption keys. After that, users inside/outside the group who have the knowledge of the group encryption key are able to send non-repudiable and privacy-preserving messages to the group confidentially. Further, even all the users’ private keys are later corrupted, the messages broadcasted previously remain secure. Following this definition, we propose a concrete protocol which is proven to be secure against chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA) directly. We also show the potential applications of our new protocol in instant messaging applications, such as Whatsapp, Wechat, Messenger.

RiSeG: a ring based secure group communication protocol for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks

Securing group communication in wireless sensor networks has recently been extensively investigated. Many works have addressed this issue, and they have considered the grouping concept differently. In this paper, we consider a group as being a set of nodes sensing the same data type, and we alternatively propose an efficient secure group communication scheme guaranteeing secure group management and secure group key distribution. The proposed scheme (RiSeG) is based on a logical ring architecture, which permits to alleviate the group controller's task in updating the group key. The proposed scheme also provides backward and forward secrecy, addresses the node compromise attack, and gives a solution to detect and eliminate the compromised nodes. The security analysis and performance evaluation show that the proposed scheme is secure, highly efficient, and lightweight. A comparison with the logical key hierarchy is preformed to prove the rekeying process efficiency of RiSeG. Finally, we present the implementation details of RiSeG on top of TelosB sensor nodes to demonstrate its feasibility.

Challenges and trends in wireless ubiquitous computing systems

In the last decade, the Internet paradigm has been evolving toward a new frontier with the emergence of ubiquitous and pervasive systems, including wireless sensor networks, ad hoc networks, RFID systems, and wireless embedded systems. In fact, while the initial purpose of the Internet was to interconnect computers to share digital data at large scale, the current tendency is to enable ubiquitous and pervasive computing to control everything anytime and at a large scale. This new paradigm has given rise to a new generation of networked systems, commonly known as Internet-of-Things or Cyber-Physical Systems. The research community has actively investigated the underlying challenges pertaining to these systems, as they fundamentally differ from the classical problems due to their inherent constraints. This special issue presents six papers covering various topics in personal and ubiquitous computing. The first paper entitled ‘‘RiSeG: A Ring Based Secure Group Communication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks’’ deals with security in ubiquitous systems. The paper presents a new approach for secure group management in wireless sensor networks. The proposed approach is based on a logical ring architecture, which permits to alleviate the group controller’s task in updating the group key. The proposed scheme also provides backward and forward secrecy, addresses the node compromise attack, and gives a solution to detect and eliminate the compromised nodes. The authors evaluated their scheme in terms of storage, computation, and communication costs and compared its behavior against the Logical Key Hierarchy (LKH) scheme. It has been shown that RiSeG requires less storage cost and reduces computation and communication costs at the Group Controller as compared with LKH. The paper goes beyond theoretical work and proposes a realworld implementation, which first proved that RiSeG is applicable to WSNs and also showed that the performance results in terms of execution time, energy consumption, and memory consumption are satisfactory. The second paper entitled ‘‘Stability routing with constrained path length for improved routability in dynamic MANETs’’ addresses the problem of enhancing the routing validity in mobile wireless multi hop ad hoc networks. In proactive routing, routes are established and updated periodically and consequently loose their pertinence as time tics away from the start of their updating instants. Authors argue that routability, defined as the validity of established routes, stands among the most centric metric impacting the network efficiency. Indeed, in dynamic networks, traffic routed through invalid routes not only amounts to a waste of valuable resources but will never be delivered to its destination. In the quest of improving routability in dynamic networks, the authors considered a two-constrained QoS routing problem with one superlative constraint and one comparative constraint. In its general form, this is an NP hard problem. The authors proposed a novel exact algorithm and then instantiated the problem to solve the optimal integer weight-constrained path length A. Belghith (&) University of Manouba, Manouba, Tunisia e-mail: abdelfattah.belghith@ensi.rnu.tn

Formal verification of secure group communication protocols modelled in UML

The paper discusses an experience in using Unified Modelling Language and two complementary verification tools in the framework of SAFECAST, a project on secured group communication systems design. AVISPA enabled detecting and fixing security flaws. The TURTLE toolkit enabled saving development time by eliminating design solutions with inappropriate temporal parameters.

A Semantics-Based Information Distribution Framework for Large Web-Based Course Forum System

We propose a novel data distribution framework for developing a large Web-based course forum system. In the distributed architectural design, each forum server is fully equipped with the ability to support some course forums independently. The forum servers collaborating with each other constitute the whole forum system. Therefore, the workload of the course forums can be shared by a group of the servers. With the secure group communication protocol and fault tolerance design, the new distribution framework provides a robust and scalable distributed architecture for the large course forum system. The forum servers can be settled in anywhere as long as a broadband network connection to Internet is provided. Our experimental performance testing results show that the large forum system is a high performance distributed system with very low communication overhead cost. In addition, all course forums are classified by their teaching content relevance. Relevant course forums can be arranged on the same forum server together. Hence our distribution framework also provides a knowledge-based taxonomic storage solution to build a large digital course teaching material library.

A hierarchical key management scheme for secure group communications in mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a kind of wireless communication infrastructure that does not have base stations or routers. Each node acts as a router and is responsible for dynamically discovering other nodes it can directly communicate with. However, when a message without encryption is sent out through a general tunnel, it may be maliciously attacked. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical key management scheme (HKMS) for secure group communications in MANETs. For the sake of security, we encrypt a packet twice. Due to the frequent changes of the topology of a MANET, we also discuss group maintenance in this paper. Finally, we conducted the security and performance analysis to compare the proposed scheme with Tseng et al.’s [Tseng, Y.-M., Yang, C.-C., Liao, D.-R., 2007. A secure group communication protocol for ad hoc wireless networks. In: Advances in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks and Mobile Computing. Book Series Signal and Communication Technology. Springer] and Steiner et al.’s [Steiner, M., Tsudik, G., Waidner, M., 1998. CLIQUES: a new approach to group key agreement. In: Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing System. Amsterdam, Netherlands, pp. 380–387] schemes.

A heterogeneous‐network aided public‐key management scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

AbstractA mobile ad hoc network does not require fixed infrastructure to construct connections among nodes. Due to the particular characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks, most existing secure protocols in wired networks do not meet the security requirements for mobile ad hoc networks. Most secure protocols in mobile ad hoc networks, such as secure routing, key agreement and secure group communication protocols, assume that all nodes must have pre‐shared a secret, or pre‐obtained public‐key certificates before joining the network. However, this assumption has a practical weakness for some emergency applications, because some nodes without pre‐obtained certificates will be unable to join the network. In this paper, a heterogeneous‐network aided public‐key management scheme for mobile ad hoc networks is proposed to remedy this weakness. Several heterogeneous networks (such as satellite, unmanned aerial vehicle, or cellular networks) provide wider service areas and ubiquitous connectivity. We adopt these wide‐covered heterogeneous networks to design a secure certificate distribution scheme that allows a mobile node without a pre‐obtained certificate to instantly get a certificate using the communication channel constructed by these wide‐covered heterogeneous networks. Therefore, this scheme enhances the security infrastructure of public key management for mobile ad hoc networks. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Storage area networking - Secure group key management for storage area networks

Storage area networks offer high availability, reliability, and scalability, and are a promising solution for large-scale storage needs of many enterprises. As with any distributed storage system, a major design challenge for SANs is to provide secure storage, which implies data integrity and data confidentiality. In this article we propose a solution that addresses these core security requirements. In particular, we focus on mechanisms that enable efficient key management for SAN entities and allow scalable data sharing. We use strong cryptographic techniques to achieve data security and integrity. Further, we delegate the bulk of the cryptographic processing to the SAN entities, thereby removing bottlenecks at disks and causing minimal inconvenience to hosts. By recognizing the peer nature of the group of SAN entities, we propose a novel security architecture for SAN that uses a secure group communication protocol to provide efficient group keying without involving any centralized servers. This fosters both scalability and fault tolerance.