Secure Group Communication Research Articles

Tree Based Scalable Secure Group Communication

In order to establish a group communication, a common key must be available with all the members of the group. The group key can be used for encrypting data between the group members or restricting access to the resources intended for group members only. Each member in a group has a unique key referred as member key, used for decrypting data in a group. The group key is distributed by group key server, which changes the group key time to time called as group rekeying. It is mandatory that the group key changes after a new user has joined and an existing user departed periodically. The existing system analyse the Bursty behaviour and operation. Burstiness is an important behavior in Secure Group Communication (SGC). Performing bursty operation, which may accumulate the simultaneous leave and join as a single operation, thus reduces the frequency of key distribution and reduces time complexity. But in the existing system the aggregate operation will occur only in rare condition so it may not perform the key reduction in all cases as well as it perform less scalability and security. To achieve better scalability, security and key reduction a new group key management protocol based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem and a hierarchical tree is proposed, in which each node contains a key and a modulus. The Keys and modulus are constructed as a tree and maintained by the key server. The key server shares the keys with each member on the path from its leaf to the root. The keys on its path from the leaf to the root need to be updated in the protocol, when a member joins or leaves the group but all modulus must be kept fixed. To update the keys on the tree, the key server generates a new key for each update node and encrypts it with its children keys on its path from the leaf to the root. Thus the new scalable protocol increases the security, scalability issues when the group size goes up to millions of members and reduces the key.

Secure protocols for data propagation and group communication in vehicular networks

Vehicular networks are organized with high-mobility vehicles, which are a challenge to key agreement and secured communication among vehicles; hence, efficient cryptography schemes for lightweight ciphers are essential. Many security schemes for vehicular networks particularly take the secure propagation of traffic-related information into account. Group communication is desirable in vehicular networks, while groups of friends drive the vehicles to travel together. In this study, it is applied an asymmetric key mechanism and a group-based Elliptic Curve cryptograph to authenticate data propagation as also to individually secure group communication. The data propagation includes a flooding delay mechanism, where each vehicle participant in the propagation calculates an individual delay for propagation. As groups of vehicles move on the roadway toward same destinations, two alternative schemes of group key agreement in vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure modes are proposed to secure group communication among the vehicles. Security analysis results present that the proposed schemes can effectively prevent malicious vehicle from participating in vehicular communications. Evaluation results show that the propagation delay mechanism can effectively reduce broadcast collision, and the delay results of the group key agreement schemes are acceptable.

An ID-based authenticated dynamic group key agreement with optimal round

Group key agreement protocols are crucial for achieving secure group communications. They are designed to provide a set of users with a shared secret key to achieve cryptographic goal over a public network. When group membership changes, the session key should be refreshed efficiently and securely. Most previous group key agreement protocols need at least two rounds to establish or refresh session keys. In this paper, a dynamic authenticated group key agreement (DAGKA) protocol based on identity-based cryptography is presented. By making use of the members’ values stored in previous sessions, our Join and Leave algorithms reduce the computation and communication costs of members. In the proposed protocol, Setup and Join algorithms need one round. The session key can be refreshed without message exchange among remaining users in Leave algorithm, which makes the protocol more practical. Its security is proved under decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption in random oracle model.

A Scalable ID-based Constant-round AGKE Protocol with Logarithmic Computation Complexity

Group key establishment is one of the basic building blocks in securing group communication. In this paper, motivated by Desmedt's BD-II protocol, we propose a secure ID-Based group key establishment protocol which has a constant number of rounds and requires only computation and communication. Our scheme achieves key negotiate by scalar multiplication other than using pairing computation which requires expensive computation cost. Moreover, we have adapted aggregate signature technique verifying the validity of transcripts simultaneously, which greatly improves the computational efficiency. We have proved the security of protocol under the intractability of DDH problem in the RO model.

Secure Group Communication with Dynamic Membership Change in Ad Hoc Networks

The importance of secure communication between only legitimate group members in ad hoc networks has been growing in recent years. Due to the ad hoc nature the scalability on dynamic membership change is a major concern. However, the previous models require at least O(log n) communication cost for key update per each membership change, which imposes a heavy burden on the devices. In this paper we present a scalable model that supports communication-efficient membership change in ad hoc networks by exclusionary keys and RSA functions. The multicast cost for key update is extremely low, that is O(1), and one-to-one communications occur mostly in neighboring devices.

Balanced key tree management for multi‐privileged groups using (N, T) policy

ABSTRACTMany internet applications are based on group communication model. For secure group communication scenario, key management is an important issue. In a hierarchical architecture, key trees are used. When users join or leave a key tree, all the ancestor nodes in the leave path till root gets affected. It encroaches threat to forward secrecy as well as backward secrecy. This poses a need for rekeying whenever users join or leave. Periodic batch rekeying is a process where the key server waits until the rekey interval is elapsed and does the rekeying process. Nevertheless, there are many key management schemes; there is still research fostering in key management in group communication for multi‐privileged users, where the users of the group have access to multiple resources, unlike the traditional case with single resource. This paper addresses batch user join or leave case in multi‐privileged environment. A variation of batch rekeying is introduced by using min(N, T) policy so that the users need not wait until the rekey interval is reached and the probabilistic analysis based on it are provided. It also discusses about the improvement in terms of number of rekeying done and provides a balanced tree when multiple users join/leave. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Load Balancing Aware Multiparty Secure Group Communication for Online Services in Wireless Mesh Networks

The internet offers services for users which can be accessed in a collaborative shared manner. Users control these services, such as online gaming and social networking sites, with handheld devices. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are an emerging technology that can provide these services in an efficient manner. Because services are used by many users simultaneously, security is a paramount concern. Although many security solutions exist, they are not sufficient. None have considered the concept of load balancing with secure communication for online services. In this paper, a load aware multiparty secure group communication for online services in WMNs is proposed. During the registration process of a new client in the network, the Load Balancing Index (LBI) is checked by the router before issuing a certificate/key. The certificate is issued only if the value of LBI is less than a predefined threshold. The authors evaluate the proposed solution against the existing schemes with respect to metrics like storage and computation overhead, packet delivery fraction (PDF), and throughput. The results show that the proposed scheme is better with respect to these metrics.

Two-round contributory group key exchange protocol for wireless network environments

AbstractWith the popularity of group-oriented applications, secure group communication has recently received much attention from cryptographic researchers. A group key exchange (GKE) protocol allows that participants cooperatively establish a group key that is used to encrypt and decrypt transmitted messages. Hence, GKE protocols can be used to provide secure group communication over a public network channel. However, most of the previously proposed GKE protocols deployed in wired networks are not fully suitable for wireless network environments with low-power computing devices. Subsequently, several GKE protocols suitable for mobile or wireless networks have been proposed. In this article, we will propose a more efficient group key exchange protocol with dynamic joining and leaving. Under the decision Diffie-Hellman (DDH), the computation Diffie-Hellman (CDH), and the hash function assumptions, we demonstrate that the proposed protocol is secure against passive attack and provides forward/backward secrecy for dynamic member joining/leaving. As compared with the recently proposed GKE protocols, our protocol provides better performance in terms of computational cost, round number, and communication cost.

An Efficient Certificate-Free Key Distribution Protocol for Secure Group Communication in Grid Environment

Problem statement: In grid environment, group communication is an important mechanism to realize large-scale information resource sharing. However providing security for group communication in grid environment is very difficult because the group is dynamic in nature. Scalable group re-keying is one of the important issues in secure group communication. These group keys should be updated whenever a member joins/leaves the group to maintain the forward and backward secrecy. Approach: In the recent years, cryptography in grid environment plays an important role that allows secure group communication among members in the dynamic group. Results: Our algorithm for key distribution falls into NP-class. Therefore the key distribution is safe. Conclusion: Performance of the proposed algorithm is computationally efficient and cryptographically strong for message generation and key distribution.

A three-level authenticated conference key establishment protocol for UMTS networks

A conference key establishment protocol allows a group of conferees to agree on a secret key shared among them for secure group communication. This paper proposes a three-level conference key establishment protocol based on the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) framework to establish a group-level key, home location register (HLR) level keys, and visitor location register (VLR) level keys simultaneously for a group of conferees. The group-level key is used to secure the communications for all conferees, the HLR-level key is for those within the same HLR domain, and the VLR-level key is for those within the same VLR domain. The group-level key can be used for securing inter-domain group-oriented applications such as commercial remote conferencing systems. The HLR- and VLR-level keys can be used for securing intra-domain subgroup applications (e.g., location-based or context-aware services) and dynamic key updating. Since our proposed protocol exploits existing UMTS security functions and the exclusive-or operation, it is compatible with UMTS architecture. This means that it is fast and easy to implement on the existing UMTS architecture. Furthermore, the proposed protocol has low computational complexities and can provide cost effectiveness, load-amortization, scalability, user authentication, key establishment, key confirmation, key updating, and lawful interception.

A Secure Group Communication and Rekeying using Rabins Squaring Trapdoor Function in Multicasting

In today‟s world of internet, secure communication among group of members has become vital, where multicasting plays an important role. In secure multicasting, security and scalability are the two important checks. Sometimes there is tradeoff between security and scalability. In order to transmit the data in a secure and scalable way, a suitable key management protocol should be implemented which reduces the number of rekey messages generated during the join or leave of any member thereby preserving forward and backward secrecy. In our proposed work, a new key management protocol has been proposed where a hierarchical structure has been implemented to improve the scalability. Derivation key is used to generate the new keys from the existing keys and Rabin‟s Squaring Trapdoor Function is used as the key derivation function to distribute the rekey messages. The security of the key derivation function lies in the hard mathematical problem of integer factorization which cannot be solved in a polynomial time. In order to increase the security, a salt value has been used along with the derivation keys for key stretching so that original keys used in the derivation function cannot be found out. The proposed protocol reduces the rekey messages by 1/d, in a d-degree tree and the number of modular exponential operations is only 2h compared to 3h in TGDH (Tree-based Group Diffie-Hellman) protocol, where h is the height of the tree.

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

An Efficient Secure Multicast Communication for P2P Network

A new algorithm for efficient key management for secure group communication in P2P network is presented. The protocol avoids the escrow problem in identity-based cryptosystem and the secure delivery of private keys. It has two rounds and requires constant pairing operation per user. The security of protocol is based on some underlying problems closely related to the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman Problem are computationally hard.

A New Scalable and Reliable Cost Effective Key Agreement Protocol for Secure Group Communication

Problem statement: In a heterogeneous environment, for a secure multicast communication, the group members have to share a secret key which is used to encrypt/decrypt the secret messages among the members. The Secure Group Communication of large scale multicast group in a dynamic environment is more complex than securing one-to-one communication due to the inherent scalability issue of group key management. Since the group members are dynamic in nature such as joining or leaving the group, the key updating is performed among the valid members without interrupting the multicast session so that non group members can’t have access to the future renewed keys. Approach: The main aim is to develop a scheme which can reduce the cost of computational overhead, number of messages needed during the time of key refreshing and the number of keys stored in servers and members. The cost of establishing the key and renewal is proportionate to the size of the group and subsequently fetches a bottleneck performance in achieving scalability. By using a Cluster Based Hierarchical Key Distribution Protocol, the load of key management can be shared among dummy nodes of a cluster without revealing the group messages to them. Results: Especially, the existing model incurs a very less computational and communication overhead during renewal of keys. The proposed scheme yields better scalability because of the fact that the Key computational cost, the keys stored in key server and numbers of rekey-messages needed are very less. Conclusion: Our proposed protocol is based on Elliptic curve cryptography algorithm to form secure group key, even with smaller key size, it is capable of providing more security. This protocol can be used both in wired or wireless environments.

A novel group key agreement protocol for wireless mesh network

Group key agreement is the core of secure group communication. In wireless networks, the privacy problem becomes more crucial and urgent for mobile users due to the open nature of radio media. In this paper, we proposed a novel group key agreement protocol based on trusted third Party, applied in collaboration between mobile users for wireless Mesh network. The security verification (PCL logic) and performance analysis show that, our protocol not only provides privacy protection for group members, but also authenticates all participants by adopting certificates. More important, in the proposed protocol, the computation cost and traffics for each group member are largely reduced to improve the implementation efficiency of the protocol. Therefore, our protocol is a novel, reliable group key agreement protocol, and it is well suited for wireless mesh network.

Secure and Efficient Multicast Rekeying Approach for Non-Transparent Relay-Based IEEE 802.16 Networks

Many emerging applications that depend on secure group communications demand the privacy of participants and access control at the multicast server. The multicast and broadcast services in IEEE 802.16 are efficient and power saving mechanisms, which no doubt also provide subscribers with strong and powerful security protection from the theft of service by encrypting broadcast connections between subscriber station (SS), relay station (RS), non-transparent relay station (NRS) and Multihop relay base station (MR-BS). However, the existing multicast and broadcast rekeying algorithm (MBRA) not only facing forward secrecy, backward secrecy and scalability problems for IEEE 802.16e but also for multi- hop relay based networks both in centralized as well as distributed zone. Although many researches try to give solutions for the above problems, all of them focus mainly on IEEE 802.16e networks and none of paper is published on distributed relay-based Wimax networks. This paper illustrates the main security problem of MBRA in general which is scalability, backward and forward secrecy and proposes a new Secure and efficient distributed Relay- based Rekeying Algorithm (SEDRRA) scheme for non- transparent Multihop IEEE 802.16 networks. The proposed scheme uses non-transparent decode and forward relays. Both analysis and performance evaluation show that our scheme can significantly reduce the complexity and solve all of the above problems in an efficient way.

A Novel Group Key Agreement Protocol for Wireless Mesh Network

Group key agreement is the core of secure group communication. In wireless networks, the privacy problem becomes more crucial and urgent for mobile users due to the open nature of radio media. In this paper, we proposed a novel group key agreement protocol based on trusted third Party, applied in collaboration between mobile users for wireless Mesh network. The security verification (PCL logic) and performance analysis show that, our protocol not only provides privacy protection for group members, but also authenticates all participants by adopting certificates. More important, in the proposed protocol, the computation cost and traffics for each group member are largely reduced to improve the implementation efficiency of the protocol. Therefore, our protocol is a novel, reliable group key agreement protocol, and it is well suited for wireless mesh network.

Balancing Revocation and Storage Trade-Offs in Secure Group Communication

In this paper, we focus on trade-offs between storage cost and rekeying cost for secure multicast. Membership in secure multicast groups is dynamic and requires multiple updates in a single time frame. We present a family of algorithms that provide a trade-off between the number of keys maintained by users and the time required for rekeying due to revocation of multiple users. We show that some well-known algorithms in the literature are members of this family. We show that algorithms in this family can be used to reduce the cost of rekeying by 43-79 percent when compared with previous solutions while keeping the number of keys manageable. We also describe a scheme to reduce the number of secrets further when revocations are periodic. Furthermore, we describe techniques to provide preferential treatment for long standing members of the group without affecting the performance of the algorithms. Using our techniques, as the group size increases, long standing members need to store smaller number of keys than short-lived members. This property is useful for adapting to the variable storage requirements of users in current day heterogeneous networks.

Distributed Group Key Management with Cluster based Communication for Dynamic Peer Groups

Secure group communication is an increasingly popular research area having received much attention in recent years. Group key management is a fundamental building block for secure group communication systems. This paper introduces a new family of protocols addressing cluster based communication, and distributed group key agreement for secure group communication in dynamic peer groups. In this scheme, group members can be divided into sub groups called clusters. We propose three cluster based communication protocols with tree-based group key management. The protocols (1) provides the communication within the cluster by generating common group key within the cluster, (2) provides communication between the clusters by generating common group key between the clusters and (3) provides the communication among all clusters by generating common group key among the all clusters. In our approach group key will be updated for each session or when a user joins or leaves the cluster. More over we use Certificate Authority which guarantees key authentication, and protects our protocol from all types of attacks.