Secure Group Communication Research Articles

A provable authenticated group key agreement protocol for mobile environment

Secure group communication over an untrusted open network is a continuing problem, especially in mobile environments. With the development of 3G networks and mobile computing technology, the number of group-oriented applications is increasing rapidly. Although these applications are convenient, achieving secure group communication to protect user privacy is a major concern. This study presents an authenticated group key agreement protocol for mobile environments. By using certificateless public key cryptography, the protocol reduces the cost of managing the certificates and avoids the key escrow problem. Instead of a fully-trusted server, the protocol uses a semi-trusted server, which helps users communicate but does not learn about the group key. The analytical results indicate that the proposed protocol provides good security in mobile environments.

Hybrid Broadcast Group Management Protocol for Secure, Scalable and Efficient Group Communication

In hasty growth of communication, security plays a central role in maintaining confidentiality of data in group communication. Keeping the data intended for the group in confidential manner is the most important security feature need to be sustained for the group communication. An efficient group key management mechanism named as Hybrid Broadcast Group Management Protocol (HBGMP) is devised based on the Reverse Function (RF) and Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). The distinctive security among the subgroups is ensured by the reverse function and the session ID of each subgroup is calculated by employing Chinese remainder theorem. By contraption, the Session ID using Chinese Remainder Theorem, with which a cohort of n users requires Sub Group Service Provider (SGSP) to do O (n/m) computation for communication and the storage cost are diminished by diverting the computing load of the Group Service Provider (GSP) into the SGSP. The significance of this protocol is the group member needs to store only two different values during the entire life span and also the rekey message is broadcasted which brings down the communication cost to O(1). The protocol is defined generally for any applications in hybrid architecture. The proposed architecture using CRT and Reverse function is scalable for hefty sized dynamically changing group.

A HYBRID GROUP BASED RE-KEY MANAGEMENT SCHEME FOR SECURE COMMUNICATION IN WIRELESS SENSOR

Secured Communication is primarily important in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), since the communication signals are explicitly available as they broadcast through the air. These networks are more vulnerable to attacks extending from passive eavesdropping to active snooping. In this paper, a hybrid Group based Re-Key Management Scheme (HG-RMS) is proposed. The objective of this paper is to provide a secure group communication in WSNs. The Group Controller is elected for each group to manage the group members. The proposed HG-RMS incorporates the Modified Hybrid Energy Efficient Distributed (M-HEED) protocol to elect the group controller. Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA) is used by the Key Management Center (KMC) to generate the keys and distribute to the group controllers. The key exchange mechanism is explored for secure communication between the users. Node compromise attacks are detected and prevented based on the periodic broadcast messages. The re - keying process is initiated whenever a node joins/leaves the group. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme performs better than the existing Cluster based Group Key Management (CB-GKM) in terms of energy, privacy level, memory, and time consumption.

Lightweight secure group communications for resource constrained devices

Providing source authentication service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is still a potential stumbling block to the wide deployment of these resource constrained devices. In this paper, we present several broadcast authentication solutions that have been developed for secure group communications in WSNs, and we come up with two novel symmetric-key-based authentication schemes. Our protocols are built upon the integration of a reputation generator on each node, a key binary tree for the efficient distribution and updating of the authentication group keys. Moreover, we refer to a Bloom filter data structure to reduce the communication overhead. We assess the feasibility of our two proposed schemes with a thorough mathematical study, estimating the average number of concatenated message authentication code, the energy consumption overhead, and the probability of detection of two state-of-the-art attacks.

A novel scheme for secure group communication in multicast network

Group key management is an important framework and functional building block for any secure multicast architecture. To improve the performance and scalability of rekeying for group key management in large-scale systems, a novel scheme was proposed. In this paper, we present dynamic and large-scale groups, and the overhead of key generating and key updating is usually relevant to the group size, which becomes a performance bottleneck in achieving scalability. The overhead of key management can be shared by the sub-group controller (SGC) and group controller, and in addition, the new protocol conduces to constant computation and communication overhead during rekeying and enhances more security. Users in the systems are grouped into sub-groups based on their subscription span. The inter-group and intra-group communication is done with the help of group key and sub-group key, respectively. An analysis shows that the cost of rekeying operations is reduced and security breaches have been reduced with the proposed group key management.

Conference key establishment protocol using a multivariate polynomial and its applications

AbstractIn 1992, a non‐interactive k‐secure m‐conference protocol based on an m‐variate polynomial has been proposed. Each user needs to store a (m − 1)‐polynomial having degree k as a private share. A secret conference key involving m users can be computed by each conference member non‐interactively using each private share. There is no overhead to exchange information in order to establish a conference key. However, the storage space of each user is exponentially proportional to the group size of the conference. In this paper, we propose a key establishment protocol using a multivariate polynomial in ZN, where N is a RSA modulus. One unique feature of using this special type of polynomials for conference key protocol is that the storage space of each user is fixed and is independent to the group size of the conference. User can use their shares obtained from a key generation center initially to establish conference keys consisting of different users. Furthermore, we propose two applications to demonstrate the importance of using this special type of polynomials to design solutions. One is the private reconstruction of secret in a secret sharing scheme over network, and the other is the secure group communication. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Group Secret Key Generation via Received Signal Strength: Protocols, Achievable Rates, and Implementation

Secret key generation among wireless devices using physical layer information of radio channel has been an attractive alternative for ensuring security in mobile environments. Received signal strength (RSS) based secret key extraction gains much attention due to its easy accessibility in wireless infrastructure. However, the problem of using RSS to generate keys among multiple devices to ensure secure group communication in practice remains open. In this work, we propose a framework for collaborative key generation among multiple wireless devices leveraging RSS. To deal with mobile devices not within each other’s communication range, we employ relay nodes to achieve reliable key extraction. To enable secure group communication, two protocols are developed to perform collaborative group key generation via star and chain topologies respectively. We further provide the theoretic analysis on the achievable secrecy rate for both star and chain topologies in the presence of an eavesdropper. Our prototype development using MICAz motes and extensive experiments using fading trend based key extraction demonstrate the feasibility of using RSS for group key generation in both indoor and outdoor environments, and concurrently achieving a lower bit mismatch rate compared to existing studies.

Provably Secure Group Key Management Approach Based upon Hyper-Sphere

Secure group communication systems have become increasingly important for many emerging network applications. An efficient and robust group key management approach is indispensable to a secure group communication system. Motivated by the theory of hyper-sphere, this paper presents a new group key management approach with a group controller (GC). In our new design, a hyper-sphere is constructed for a group and each member in the group corresponds to a point on the hyper-sphere, which is called the member's private point. The GC computes the central point of the hyper-sphere, intuitively, whose “distance” from each member's private point is identical. The central point is published such that each member can compute a common group key, using a function by taking each member's private point and the central point of the hyper-sphere as the input. This approach is provably secure under the pseudo-random function (PRF) assumption. Compared with other similar schemes, by both theoretical analysis and experiments, our scheme (1) has significantly reduced memory and computation load for each group member; (2) can efficiently deal with massive membership change with only two re-keying messages, i.e., the central point of the hyper-sphere and a random number; and (3) is efficient and very scalable for large-size groups.

New Results on Ideal Multipartite Secret Sharing and its Applications to Group Communications

With the rapid development of various group-oriented services, multipartite group communications occur frequently in a single network, where a multipartite access structure is defined to be a collection of the subsets of users who may come from different parts of the network such that only users in an authorized subset of users can use their shares to build up a group key for a secure group communication. Most existing group key establishment schemes based on a secret sharing target on building up a group key for a threshold access structure, and need to compute a $$t$$t-degree interpolating polynomial in order to encrypt and decrypt the secret group key. This approach is not suitable and inefficient in terms of computational complexity for multipartite group environments which need to realize the multipartite access structures. In 1991, Brickell et al. proved that an ideal access structure is induced by a matroid and furthermore, an access structure is ideal if it is induced by a representable matroid. In this paper, we study the characterization of representable matroids. By using the connection between ideal secret sharing and matroids and, in particular, the recent results on ideal multipartite access structures and the connection between multipartite matroids and discrete polymatroids, we introduce a new concept on $$R$$R-tuple, which is determined by the rank function of the associated discrete polymatroid. Using this new concept, we come up a new and simple sufficient condition for a multipartite matroid to be representable (in fact, every matroid and every access structure are multipartite). In other words, we have developed a sufficient condition for an access structure to be ideal. These new results can be applied to establish multipartite group keys efficiently in secure group communications.

SECURE QoS-BASED ROUTING USING HIERARCHICAL KEY RANKING MODEL IN MANET

Quality of service (QoS) and security have been considered as two competent units to govern and administer end-to-end traffic across network. A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a type of wireless communication, every node can act as a router or base station. Secure QoS-based routing is an important problem in MANET. A hierarchical key ranking (HKR) model is presented here for secure group communications in MANETs. To enhance the security, one-to-one random mapping is performed using hash-based message authentication code (HashMAC). Due to the dynamic nature and topological changes in MANET, group safeguarding is efficiently accomplished. For secure group communication and efficient QoS routing in MANET, a sector key (SK) is shared among group members to encrypt group messages which is obtained using secured message authenticated code (SMAC). The primary design is to include the group members in sector to vigorously contribute to the security of the multicast group, as a result dropping the communication and calculating load on the source. Experimental evaluation is done to estimate the performance of the proposed secure QoS routing and communication using hierarchical key ranking [SRHKR] in MANET in terms of delivery rate, security level, delay.

An improved conference‐key agreement protocol for dynamic groups with efficient fault correction

AbstractThe pervasive usage of the Internet has made secure group communications a significant issue. Conference‐key agreement protocols provide secure group communications with lower computational cost. Providing key agreements and updates of dynamic groups in an efficient manner is a significant challenge for conference‐key agreement protocols. Auxiliary key agreement operations are needed to solve the challenge. In this paper, we propose an improved conference‐key agreement protocol, called Dynamic Conference‐Key Agreement Protocol, that consists of Initial Conference‐Key Agreement Protocol and Auxiliary Conference‐Key Agreement operations. Dynamic Conference‐Key Agreement Protocol has operations to handle dynamic groups. The proposed protocol has better fault correction and provides the same security level with the existing ones. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Composing Kerberos and Multimedia Internet KEYing (MIKEY) for AuthenticatedTransport of Group Keys

We motivate and present two designs for the composition of the authentication protocol, Kerberos, and the key transport protocol, Multimedia Internet KEYing (MIKEY) for authenticated transport of cryptographic keys for secure group-communication in enterprise and public-safety settings. A technical challenge, and our main contribution, is the analysis of the security of the composition. Towards this, we design our compositions to have intuitive appeal and thereby less prone to security vulnerabilities. We then employ protocol composition logic (PCL), a state-of-the-art approach for analyzing our composition. For this, we first articulate two properties that are of interest. Both properties are on the group key that is transported; we call them Group Key Confidentiality and Acquisition. Group Key Confidentiality is the property that if a principal possesses the key, then it is an authorized member of the group. Group Key Acquisition is the property that if a principal is a member of the group, then it is able to acquire the group key. In the course of our rigorous analysis, we discovered a flaw in our first design, which we point out, and which lead us to our second design. We have implemented both designs starting with the publicly available reference implementation of Kerberos, and an open-source implementation of MIKEY. Our implementations are available as open-source. We discuss our experience from the implementation, and present empirical results.

A Secure and Efficient Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Scheme using Bloom Filter in VANETs

VANETs (Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks) are a next-generation networking technology that provides communication between vehicles or between a vehicle and an RSU (Road Side Unit) using wireless communication. A vehicle accident is likely to cause a serious disaster. Therefore, the VANET system provides an essential information exchange protocol for communication between vehicles. However, a key exchange scheme based on the proposed general network for a high-speed communication environment is not suitable for vehicles. In this paper, the first communication from the RSU passes only group keys. Then it updates the key value in the communication with the vehicle using Bloom filters to verify the proposed method. In the proposed scheme in VANET, dispersed operations are carried out in the RSU. By reducing to a minimum the number of keys exchanged, more secure group communication can be realized. In this paper, we proposed a message batch verification scheme using Bloom Filter that can verify multiple messages and handover authentication efficiently even for multiple communications with many vehicles.

EAPSG: Efficient authentication protocol for secure group communications in maritime wideband communication networks

The maritime wideband communication network, which extends the operation of wireless access from land to sea, will significantly contribute to the maritime distress, urgency, safety, and general communications. The Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) technology has been applied to establish a maritime wideband shore-side network infrastructure, to achieve large capacity data backhauls. However, in this scenario, many new security and privacy challenges are arising, e.g., the reduced time overhead for group access authentication due to limited time window vessels passing by infostations along the shore-side. In this paper, a simple and reliable group authentication framework is developed for dealing with security issues in this special maritime wideband communication scenario. Specifically, an efficient authentication protocol for secure group communications (EAPSG) in maritime wideband communication network is proposed based on the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH), to overcome the weakness existing in the prevailing protocols on land, i.e., user identity disclosure, the lack of perfect forward secrecy, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Meanwhile, EAPSG can reduce the communication overhead and computational complexity by designing group access authentication procedures. Compared with conventional EAP-AKA protocol used in WiMAX networks on land, our scheme enhances the security and provides better performance. Especially, the security of the proposed protocol was verified by Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA), and detailed performance evaluations are also given. The results illustrate that the proposed EAPSG outperforms other existing schemes on land in terms of the delivery cost and the number of signaling messages.

Security Assessment for Key Management in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a kind of wireless communication system that doesn't have base stations or routers. The wireless connections can be a standard Wi-Fi connection or satellite, or another medium such as a cellular transmission. Specific applications like military or public emergency require secure group communication in ad hoc environments. Good Key management is very important to get protection in any communication system. This paper presents most problems of securing key management in ad hoc networks. It presents a survey of different types of key management protocols in wired networks and in ad hoc networks. It presents the most common kinds of attacks in ad hoc networks. A new efficient approach is proposed. It is based on dividing the members into clusters. This scheme assumes a maximum allowed number of members in each cluster. This reduces the required number of encryption and decryption operations for each join operation in the cluster. This is most suitable for Mobile Ad hoc Networks.

Group Key Management Based on Random Perturbation in Wireless Sensor Networks

组密钥在传感器网络安全组通信及虚假数据过滤等安全服务中起着重要作用.针对节点可能被大量俘获这一安全威胁研究组密钥管理问题,提出了一种基于随机混淆技术的组密钥管理机制GKRP(group key managementscheme based on random perturbation).首先,提出了一种基站与网络协同的组密钥管理框架;然后,结合秘密共享技术和随机混淆技术构造了组密钥广播函数和局部协作等功能函数,以实现组密钥更新信息的广播传输和多个被俘获节点的撤销;最后,基于上述管理框架和函数,提出了机制GKRP,使得节点间可以协作进行组密钥更新.理论分析及仿真结果表明,GKRP 在特定的参数设置下不受限于被俘获节点,且该参数易于满足.因此,GKRP 有效突破了门限值问题,提高了网络的抗毁性.同时,由于采取局部广播和全网络广播方式更新组密钥,GKRP 在通信上同样更为有效.GKRP 的存储和计算开销略高于已有同类机制,但仍然较低,适合于传感器网络.;In sensor networks, a group key plays an important role in both secure group communication and some security services such as false date filtering. Considering the security threat that there may be plenty of compromised nodes, a new group key management scheme based on random perturbation and secret sharing techniques is proposed (GKRP for short). In the GKRP, base station and local networks manage group keys cooperatively; additionally, some functions such as the broadcast rekeying function and local collaboration function are constructed. Thus, with GKRP, even if there are plenty of compromised nodes, these nodes can be revoked in real-time to ensure group key security. Extensive analyses and simulations show that GKRP can provide a higher level of security because GKRP is not limited to the compromised nodes under certain conditions, which can be satisfied easily. Moreover, GKRP is also more efficient on communication as taking local broadcast and network broadcast to rekey. The storage and computation overheads of GKRP are somewhat higher than some related works; however, they are still lightweight and thus are suitable to sensor networks.

ECDH-based Scalable Distributed Key Management Scheme for Secure Group Communication

With the popularity of group-oriented applications, secure and efficient communication among all group members has become a major issue. An efficient key management mechanism is the base and critical technology of secure group communications. A distributed grouporiented key management scheme without the participation of third parties is proposed in the paper. The scheme deploys Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) which is more lightweight compared to regular Diffie-Hellman. The approach includes group key establishment and rekeying algorithms when there are membership changes. By using a distributed architecture, the load of key management is reduced. Specifically, the scheme can be extended to hybrid architecture to provide better scalability. Consequently, the extended scheme is both fault-tolerant and efficient in terms of integrity and confidentiality. In all protocol suites, the shared group key is calculated by scalar multiplication. According to performance comparisons with other schemes, the proposed scheme dramatically reduces communication overhead and computational costs. Security analysis indicates that the proposal provides a number of desirable security properties, including group key secrecy, forward secrecy and backward secrecy.

An Unified Approach by Implementing the Secured Authentication Protocol Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is an ad-hoc mobile network and is highly vulnerable to attacks because, it consists of various resource-constrained devices and they communicate via wireless links. Security of group communication for large mobile wireless sensor network hinges on efficient authentication protocol scheme. Consequently, one of the most primary challenge, on endow with the security services in sensor nodes are key distribution. Secure communications in wireless sensor networks are critical. As the wireless medium is characterized by its lossy nature, reliable communication cannot be assumed with pair-wise keys, LOCK (Localized Combinatorial Keying) and Structured Graphs etc. Therefore, security with key distribution is a good factor considered in wireless sensor network communications. The only requirement for a user is to send information in a reliable manner to the destination; this will be provided only with the security. In this regard, a novel secured authentication protocol scheme with finger-print scheme provides full security and very good resilience is proposed. It also has low transaction overhead and reduced less space overhead. This novel method produces good improvements in the functionality of security.

Secure Collaborative Key Management for Dynamic Groups in Mobile Networks

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.

Group Key Management Protocols for Secure Mobile Multicast Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

Key management is equally important as compared to any other security measure such as encryption and authentication. With the growing usage of mobile devices and the advent of multicast communication, there has been a significant amount of work carried out in developing an optimum group key management protocol for mobile multicast systems. Key management is widely being adopted in securing group communication for both wired and wireless networks. Securing group communication over wired networks is fairly well established; however, wireless networks bring additional challenges due to member mobility and increase in the number of members. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of group key management protocols in wireless mobile environments that employ multicast communication. They are classified into network dependent and independent protocols and further categorized into tree-based and cluster-based key management protocols. The survey clearly outlines the characteristics of each protocol along with highlighting their advantages and limitations with respect to real-world systems. The paper is concluded with a taxonomy of the individual protocols with respect to the defined requirements which provides a strong source of literature reference for researchers in this field.