Self-healing Group Key Distribution Schemes Research Articles

Secure Self-healing Group Key Distribution Scheme with Constant Storage for SCADA Systems in Smart Grid

Smart grid has a great advantage over the traditional power grid and it is a critical condition in people’s daily life. The security of data communication in smart grid is important and needs to be efficiently guaranteed. The supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems is in charge of supervising the sensitive process. In SCADA systems, the secure communication between control center and remote terminal units can be achieved by the key distribution mechanism. However, the remote terminal units are resource-constrained and sometimes are not available so that they cannot receive the session key updating broadcast. Self-healing is an efficient mechanism to calculate missing session keys by using later broadcast messages. In this paper, we propose an efficient self-healing group key distribution scheme for SCADA systems. The security analysis illustrates that our scheme satisfy the basic security properties defined in security model. According to the performance evaluation from storage and communication cost viewpoints, the proposed scheme is efficient.

On the Security of a Self-Healing Group Key Distribution Scheme

Recently, Wang et al. (J Secur Commun Netw 5(12):1363---1374, 2012) proposed a self-healing group key distribution (SGKD) scheme for resource-constrained wireless networks. They claimed that their proposed SGKD scheme satisfies forward security, backward security and can resist collusion attack. Unfortunately, we found some security flaws in their scheme. In this paper, we present a method to attack this scheme. The attack illustrates that this scheme does not satisfy forward security, which also directly breaks the collusion resistance capability. We also propose an improved scheme with constant storage overhead and satisfactory security.

Exponential Arithmetic Based Self-Healing Group Key Distribution Scheme with Backward Secrecy under the Resource-Constrained Wireless Networks.

In resource-constrained wireless networks, resources such as storage space and communication bandwidth are limited. To guarantee secure communication in resource-constrained wireless networks, group keys should be distributed to users. The self-healing group key distribution (SGKD) scheme is a promising cryptographic tool, which can be used to distribute and update the group key for the secure group communication over unreliable wireless networks. Among all known SGKD schemes, exponential arithmetic based SGKD (E-SGKD) schemes reduce the storage overhead to constant, thus is suitable for the the resource-constrained wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a new mechanism to achieve E-SGKD schemes with backward secrecy. We first propose a basic E-SGKD scheme based on a known polynomial-based SGKD, where it has optimal storage overhead while having no backward secrecy. To obtain the backward secrecy and reduce the communication overhead, we introduce a novel approach for message broadcasting and self-healing. Compared with other E-SGKD schemes, our new E-SGKD scheme has the optimal storage overhead, high communication efficiency and satisfactory security. The simulation results in Zigbee-based networks show that the proposed scheme is suitable for the resource-restrained wireless networks. Finally, we show the application of our proposed scheme.

Improved one-way hash chain and revocation polynomial-based self-healing group key distribution schemes in resource-constrained wireless networks.

Self-healing group key distribution (SGKD) aims to deal with the key distribution problem over an unreliable wireless network. In this paper, we investigate the SGKD issue in resource-constrained wireless networks. We propose two improved SGKD schemes using the one-way hash chain (OHC) and the revocation polynomial (RP), the OHC&RP-SGKD schemes. In the proposed OHC&RP-SGKD schemes, by introducing the unique session identifier and binding the joining time with the capability of recovering previous session keys, the problem of the collusion attack between revoked users and new joined users in existing hash chain-based SGKD schemes is resolved. Moreover, novel methods for utilizing the one-way hash chain and constructing the personal secret, the revocation polynomial and the key updating broadcast packet are presented. Hence, the proposed OHC&RP-SGKD schemes eliminate the limitation of the maximum allowed number of revoked users on the maximum allowed number of sessions, increase the maximum allowed number of revoked/colluding users, and reduce the redundancy in the key updating broadcast packet. Performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed OHC&RP-SGKD schemes are practical for resource-constrained wireless networks in bad environments, where a strong collusion attack resistance is required and many users could be revoked.

One-way hash chain-based self-healing group key distribution scheme with collusion resistance capability in wireless sensor networks

In order to resolve the collusion resistance problem in the one-way hash chain-based self-healing group key distribution schemes and improve the performance of previous self-healing group key distribution schemes, we propose a self-healing group key distribution scheme based on the revocation polynomial and a special one-way hash key chain for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in this paper. In our proposed scheme, by binding the time at which the user joins the group with the capability of recovering previous group session keys, a new method is addressed to provide the capability of resisting the collusion attack between revoked users and new joined users, and a special one-way hash chain utilization method and some new methods to construct the personal secret, the revocation polynomial and the key updating broadcast packet are presented. Compared with existing schemes under same conditions, our proposed scheme not only supports more revoked users and sessions, but also provides a stronger security. Moreover, our proposed scheme reduces the communication overhead, and is especially suited for a large scale WSN in bad environments where a strong collusion attack resistance capability is required and many users will be revoked.

Long-lived Self-healing Group Key Distribution Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

The self-healing group key distribution with revocation can deal with the session key distribution problem for secure group communication over an unreliable wireless network, with the capability of resistance to the packet loss and the collusion attack. However, since previous self-healing group key distribution schemes are restricted to m sessions, they will be reset frequently, which leads to large power and bandwidth consumption. In order to prolong the life span of the self-healing group key distribution schemes and save energy, we propose an efficient long-lived δ -self-healing group key distribution scheme with revocation and collusion resistance capabilities for wireless sensor networks in this paper. Our proposed scheme is capable of supporting infinite sessions by updating the personal secret of group members during each session and performing a partial revocation. Compared to previous schemes under same conditions, security and performance analysis results show that our proposed scheme not only resolves the lifetime extension problem, but also achieves better security performance with lower storage and communication costs.

자가 치료 기능과 취소 능력을 가진 효율적인 그룹키 분배 기법

자가 치료 기능을 가진 그룹키 분배 기법은 신뢰성이 약한 네트워크 환경에서 특정 세션의 그룹키 정보를 수신하지 못한 사용자가 그룹 매니저와의 추가적인 통신 없이 스스로 세션키를 복구할 수 있도록 해주는 방식이다. 본 논문에서는 자가 치료 기능을 가진 새로운 그룹키 분배 기법을 제안한다. 여기에서 제안하는 방식은 취소 능력을 가지며, 사용자의 저장 메모리 관점에서 최적이고, 통신 복잡도 측면에서는 기존의 방법들 보다 효율적이다. 최근에 제안된 Blondo 등(13)과 Liu 등(14)의 방식에서 사용한 브로드캐스트 방법을 적절히 원용함으로써 메모리 정장소는 최적이고, 통신 복잡도 관점에서는 기존 두 방식들보다 약 2배정도 개선된 결과를 얻는다. 또한, 제안한 프로토콜이 t-차 순방향 및 역방향 기밀성을 만족한다는 사실을 증명하고, 단일 브로드캐스트 메시지를 통해서 그룹세션키를 복구할 수 있는 보다 효율적인 자가 치료 기능을 가진 그룹키 분배 기법도 가능함을 보인다. In the self-healing group key distribution scheme, users are capable of recovering lost group keys on their own without requesting additional transmission from the group manager, where there is no reliable network infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a new self-healing group key distribution scheme with revocation capability, which is optimal in terms of user memory storage and more efficient in terms of communication complexity than the previous results. We obtain a slightly improved result from (13) and (14) by using the new broadcasting method. In addition, we prove that our scheme has the properties of t-wise forward secrecy and t-wise backward secrecy, and extend this self-healing approach to the session key recovery scheme from a single broadcast message.