Long-Lived Self-Healing Group Key Distribution Scheme with Backward Secrecy

Abstract

Self-healing group key distribution schemes allow for the establishment of a secure multicast communication between a group manager and group members through an unreliable broadcast channel. They can be used in multicast networks with centralized management, such as machine-to-machine systems, embedded and sensor networks, cellular networks and wireless networks. Constructions based on the exponential arithmetic are currently the most efficient long-lived schemes, but they lack backward secrecy. In this paper we present a new mechanism, which allows to achieve backward secrecy in this class of schemes and we illustrate its use in a long-lived key distribution scheme. Then, we perform security and performance analyses of the scheme, in order to show that it is efficient, achieves forward and backward secrecy, and resists collusion between the newly joined users and the revoked ones.