Self-Healing Key Distribution with Limited Group Membership Property

Abstract

Self-healing key distribution enables users in a large and dynamic group to establish session keys for secure group communication over an unreliable network. The main property of self-healing key distribution is that the users are capable of recovering lost session keys on their own, without requesting additional transmissions from the group manager. In this paper, we propose a self-healing key distribution scheme for unreliable networks with constrained bandwidth resources. Our scheme has the limited group membership property that there exists an upper bound on the number of members in the group. We show that our scheme has a better tradeoff between storage and communication overhead than some previous schemes.