Secure Group Communication Scheme Research Articles

Network impact analysis on the performance of Secure Group Communication schemes with focus on IoT

Secure and scalable group communication environments are essential for many IoT applications as they are the cornerstone for different IoT devices to work together securely to realize smart applications such as smart cities or smart health. Such applications are often implemented in Wireless Sensor Networks, posing additional challenges. Sensors usually have low capacity and limited network connectivity bandwidth. Over time, a variety of Secure Group Communication (SGC) schemes have emerged, all with their advantages and disadvantages. This variety makes it difficult for users to determine the best protocol for their specific application purpose. When selecting a Secure Group Communication scheme, it is crucial to know the model’s performance under varying network conditions. Research focused so far only on performance in terms of server and client runtimes. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to perform a network-based performance analysis of SGC schemes. Specifically, we analyze the network impact on the two centralized SGC schemes SKDC and LKH and one decentralized/contributory SGC scheme G-DH. To this end, we used the ComBench tool to simulate different network situations and then measured the times required for the following group operations: group creation, adding and removing members. The evaluation of our simulation results indicates that packet loss and delay influence the respective SGC schemes differently and that the execution time of the group operations depends more on the network situations than on the group sizes.

Benchmarking of Secure Group Communication schemes with focus on IoT

As Internet of Things (IoT) devices become ubiquitous, they face increasing cybersecurity threats. Unlike standard 1-to-1 communication, the unique challenge posed by n-to-n communication in IoT is that messages must not be encrypted for a single recipient but for a group of recipients. For this reason, using Secure Group Communication (SGC) schemes is necessary to encrypt n-to-n communication efficiently for large group sizes. To this end, the literature presents various SGC schemes with varying features, performance profiles, and architectures, making the selection process challenging. A selection from this multitude of SGC schemes should best be made based on a benchmark that provides an overview of the performance of the schemes. Such a benchmark would make it much easier for developers to select an SGC scheme, but such a benchmark still needs to be created. This paper aims to close this gap by presenting a benchmark for SGC schemes that focus on IoT. Since the design of a benchmark first requires the definition of the underlying business problems, we defined suitable problems for using SGC schemes in the IoT sector as the first step. We identified a common problem for the centralized and decentralized/hybrid SGC schemes, whereas the distributed/contributory SGC schemes required defining an independent business problem. Based on these business problems, we first designed a specification-based benchmark, which we then extended to a hybrid benchmark through corresponding implementations. Finally, we deployed our hybrid benchmark in a typical IoT environment and measured and compared the performance of different SGC schemes. Our findings reveal notable impacts on calculation times and storage requirements without a trusted Central Instance (CI) in distributed/contributory SGC schemes.

SED-SGC: A scalable, efficient, and distributed secure group communication scheme based on superlattice PUF

A critical challenge in group communication is to guarantee the authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of sensitive data, especially in scenarios with potential and prospective massive device access, such as the Internet of Everything (IoE). This paper explores a scalable, efficient, distributed secure group communication (SED-SGC) scheme that employs superlattice Physical Unclonable Function (PUF), tree structure, and the Decision Diffie–Hellman Problem. In SED-SGC, superlattice PUF facilitates lightweight, high-security mutual authentication and key generation. The Decision Diffie–Hellman Problem and tree structure construct group key agreement and dynamic member management protocol with logarithmic complexity, achieving forward and backward secrecy. Also, we demonstrate that SED-SGC can effectively guarantee security against multiple attack methods such as collusion attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM), and impersonation attacks.

Recommendation of secure group communication schemes using multi-objective optimization

The proliferation of IoT devices has made them an attractive target for hackers to launch attacks on systems, as was the case with Netflix or Spotify in 2016. As the number of installed IoT devices is expected to increase worldwide, so does the potential threat and the importance of securing these devices and their communications. One approach to mitigate potential threats is the usage of the so-called Secure Group Communications (SGC) schemes to secure the communication of the devices. However, it is difficult to determine the most appropriate SGC scheme for a given use case because many different approaches are proposed in the literature. To facilitate the selection of an SGC scheme, this work examines 34 schemes in terms of their computational and communication costs and their security characteristics, leading to 24 performance and security features. Based on this information, we modeled the selection process for centralized, distributed, and decentralized schemes as a multi-objective problem and used decision trees to prioritize objectives.

A Survey on Secure Group Communication Schemes With Focus on IoT Communication

A key feature for Internet of Things (IoT) is to control what content is available to each user. To handle this access management, encryption schemes can be used. Due to the diverse usage of encryption schemes, there are various realizations of 1-to-1, 1-to-n, and n-to-n schemes in the literature. This multitude of encryption methods with a wide variety of properties presents developers with the challenge of selecting the optimal method for a particular use case, which is further complicated by the fact that there is no overview of existing encryption schemes. To fill this gap, we envision a cryptography encyclopedia providing such an overview of existing encryption schemes. In this survey paper, we take a first step towards such an encyclopedia by creating a sub-encyclopedia for secure group communication (SGC) schemes, which belong to the n-to-n category. We extensively surveyed the state-of-the-art and classified 47 different schemes. More precisely, we provide (i) a comprehensive overview of the relevant security features, (ii) a set of relevant performance metrics, (iii) a classification for secure group communication schemes, and (iv) workflow descriptions of the 47 schemes. Moreover, we perform a detailed performance and security evaluation of the 47 secure group communication schemes. Based on this evaluation, we create a guideline for the selection of secure group communication schemes.

Secured Key Management Scheme for Multicast Network Using Graphical Password

In recent days, management of keys in a group has become a significant part of data communication. The textual and alphanumerical passwords used for security concern have now changed its trend to different graphical passwords procedures. Many researchers have introduced various efficient and scalable key management schemes and it is difficult to remember this type of password. There are many textual password authentication mechanisms now available in the software market and are prone to eavesdropping, dictionary attacks and shoulder surfing. To address all the above vulnerability, many researchers and practitioners have developed different authentication methods who are interested in finding an alternate way to the existing problem. Hence, this paper proposes a secure group communication scheme between group members using graphical passwords and this is easy to remember compared to a textual password but difficult to hack. The elliptic curve cryptography technique is applied for key distribution. The group key is a graphical password which is static and shared among all the members in a group. The sequence of images will be sent to the members/users of a group during registration to form a group key and the group controller sends a pass point value of each image to the member by using elliptic curve cryptography after the registration. The main focus of the proposed scheme is to provide better security and ensures negligible communication overhead and computation overhead.

A Secure MANET Routing Protocol for Crisis Situations

Emergency and rescue operations are often carried out in areas where the network infrastructure cannot be relied on for message exchange between first responders. Since a fundamental feature of a Mobile Ad Hoc Network is the ability to operate independently of existing infrastructure, it is deemed a well-suited solution to first responders scenarios. In this article, the authors describe a security extension to the OLSR routing protocol specifically designed for first responder scenarios. The proposed protocol provides node authentication and access control using asymmetric encryption and digital certificates, and also offers a secure group communication scheme. A link encryption scheme is devised to allow for efficient encryption of data even in broadcast mode, without the need for a network-wide shared key. By utilising pairwise symmetric keys for link confidentiality, the authors' solution is both efficient and scalable.

Secure group communication schemes for dynamic heterogeneous distributed computing

Nowadays Sensor Networks and Ad Hoc Networks are widely used communication facilities, mainly because of their many application settings. Again, though above types of network are paradigms of communication widespread and well-established in the state of the art, however, they turn out to be among the most important concepts underlying the modern and increasingly expanding User-Centric Networks, which can be used to build dynamic middleware services for heterogeneous distributed computing. In this way, can be addressed the strong dynamic behavior of user communities and of resource collections they use.In this paper we focus our attention on key predistribution for secure communications in those types of networks. In particular, we first analyze some schemes proposed in the literature for enabling a group of two or more nodes to compute a common key, which can be used later on to encrypt or authenticate exchanged messages. The schemes we have chosen are well representative of different design strategies proposed in the state of the art. Moreover, in order to find out under which conditions and in which settings a scheme is more suitable than others, we provide an evaluation and a performance comparison of those schemes. Furthermore, we look at the problem of identifying optimal values for the parameters of such schemes, with respect to a certain desirable security degree and reasonable security assumptions. Finally, we extend one of those schemes, showing both analytically and through experiments, the improvement the new scheme provides in terms of security compared to the basic one.

VANET中一种可撤销的车辆群组批认证方法

This paper presents a secure group communication scheme to relieve the bottleneck problem of vehicular authentication efficiency using batch verification to accelerate the authentication speed during the group construction phase. We use a certificateless public key cryptosystem encryption scheme to overcome the key escrow problem. Specific to the revocation of malicious vehicles, a bloom filter is applied to issuing the information of the revoked vehicles instead of the time-consuming revocation list. By performance evaluation, the proposed scheme outperforms previously reported schemes in terms of the authentication delay and transmission overhead.

Secure group communication with both confidentiality and non‐repudiation for mobile ad‐hoc networks

Secure group communication with efficient self-organising key agreement protocol and small broadcast ciphertext is essential to many collaborative and distributed applications in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). In this study, the authors propose a Chinese Remainder Theorem-based secure group communication scheme which is able to provide confidentiality service and non-repudiation service simultaneously. In the proposed scheme, all group members contribute their own public keys to negotiate a shared encryption public key, which corresponds to all different decryption keys. By using the shared public key and the respective secret key, confidentiality and non-repudiation can be obtained, respectively. Both are essential to secure group communication in MANETs. Compared with the exiting signcryption schemes for multiple recipients, the proposed self-organising scheme has much smaller ciphertext that does not increase with the size of the group. Accordingly, it is quite suitable to secure group communication in self-organising, distributed and resource-constrained MANETs.

Secure group and multi-layer group communication schemes based on polynomial interpolation

Secure group communication model poses the challenge of key management to enforce the access control among the users of the group. Secure group key management schemes should be designed such that there is less rekeying and storage cost involved to manage the group keys. We propose a centralized, scalable, share-based secure group key management scheme employing a new approach on the basis of the polynomial interpolation technique. We prove the security of the scheme. We design a multilayer share-based key management scheme to manage the keys in the multilayer communication model. A new aggregate tree structure is proposed to manage the keys in the multilayer communication model. We analyze and evaluate the performance of the designed schemes in detail for storage and rekeying cost. We show that the proposed share-based group key management scheme and the multilayer key management schemes are efficient in terms of storage and rekeying cost in comparison with two schemes based on threshold secret-sharing method available in the literature. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

LNT: A logical neighbor tree secure group communication scheme for wireless sensor networks

Secure group communication is a paradigm that primarily designates one-to-many communication security. The proposed works relevant to secure group communication have predominantly considered the whole network as being a single group managed by a central powerful node capable of supporting heavy communication, computation and storage cost. However, a typical Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) may contain several groups, and each one is maintained by a sensor node (the group controller) with constrained resources. Moreover, the previously proposed schemes require a multicast routing support to deliver the rekeying messages. Nevertheless, multicast routing can incur heavy storage and communication overheads in the case of a wireless sensor network. Due to these two major limitations, we have reckoned it necessary to propose a new secure group communication with a lightweight rekeying process. Our proposal overcomes the two limitations mentioned above, and can be applied to a homogeneous WSN with resource-constrained nodes with no need for a multicast routing support. Actually, the analysis and simulation results have clearly demonstrated that our scheme outperforms the previous well-known solutions.

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.

Lower bounds and new constructions on secure group communication schemes

This paper presents both the theoretical and practical aspects of secure group communication schemes. We pointed out that multiple revocation is a fundamentally time-consuming task in secure group communication, by establishing lower bounds for broadcast encryption and group key distribution schemes. We showed that they are O ( n ) for BE and O ( n / m ) for GKD respectively, where m is storage requirement and n is the number of users. Thus, they are clearly far more costly than the ideal log bound. In practice, we designed a new broadcast encryption scheme RBE that actually achieves these lower bounds. RBE is shown to outperform most efficient BE schemes in mass revocation. We discuss the influence of join as well as the feasibility of adding it in BE schemes by means of performing full updating or overprovisioning.

오버레이 링을 이용한 이동 에이전트 간의 안전한 그룹 통신 기법

일반적인 멀티에이전트 시스템에서 에이전트들 간의 통신 기능을 지원하기 위한 다양한 모델들이 제안되어 왔으며, 특히, 그룹 통신 기능을 지원하기 위한 다양한 기법들이 제시되어 있다. 그러나, 이동 에이전트 환경에서는 에이전트의 이주로 인해 발생하는 토폴로지의 변화를 고려한 새로운 그룹 통신 기법을 필요로 하며, 더불어 이러한 그룹 통신 기능의 안전성을 보장하는 기법이 필요하게 된다. 본 논문에서는 계층적 오버레이 링을 이용한 이동 에이전트들 간의 안전한 그룹 통신 기법을 제안하며, 이 기법은 이동 에이전트의 이주에 따른 토폴로지의 변화에 유연하게 대응하기 위해 링 채널을 이용한다. 여기서 링 채널은 이동 에이전트들 간의 링 토폴로지를 구성하기 위한 객체로서 이동 에이전트 플랫폼에 의해서만 관리되며, 이에 따라 이동 에이전트들은 링 채널을 직접 관리할 필요가 없게 되고, 이주에 의해 발생하는 링 토폴로지 변화에 대한 고려 없이 그룹 통신을 진행할 수 있게 된다. In multi agent systems, various inter agent communication models have been proposed, and, especially, there are several group communication schemes proposed so far, where some schemes guarantees transparent communication among the agents. However, in mobile agent environments, we require new group communication schemes that consider topology changes caused by mobile agent migrations. Also, these group communication schemes should be secure in order for them to be practical. In this paper, we propose a secure group communication scheme using the hierarchical overlay ring structure of mobile agents. The proposed scheme uses the ring channel in order to cope adaptively with the change of ring topology. The ring channel has basic information for construction of the ring and is managed only by the mobile agent platforms. Therefore, each mobile agent need not directly handle the ring channel and it can perform group communication without any consideration on the change of the ring topology.

A novel collusion-resilient architecture for secure group communication in wireless ad-hoc networks

Current architectures for secure group communication schemes have been designed with both the Internet and network-level multicast as an underlying infrastructure. However, such schemes may not be ...