An Efficient and Secure Group Key Management Scheme in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The design of group key management schemes and protocols, whose main objective is to provide secure and reliable communication, is one of the hot topics in the basic research field of secure mobile ad hoc network. However, existent group management schemes are not suited to MANET due to its intrinsic properties such as being dynamic, node resource constraints and no fixed infrastructure. In order to overcome the drawback, an efficient and secure group key management scheme (ESGKM) is proposed in this paper. ESGKM does not require a trusted dealer and only runs an interactive protocol to generate group sharing secret key among n parties. The scheme can adapt to topological change automatically and increase the security of the protocol. The application of ECC and bilinear pairing improves the performance of group key generation algorithm and the verification of the shares of sub-secret and group secret further enhances the security of the protocol. In the scheme, a group rekeying and group key consistency management algorithm based on group key service center (GKSC) is also proposed, which can reduce communication and computation overheads of the protocol effectively the and avoid the problem of isolated nodes caused by the group key inconsistency. Strand spaces model is used to prove the correctness and security of ESGKM. The performance analysis results show that the proposed scheme can reduce effectively resource cost, adapt the characteristics of MANET and is clearly superior to the existing BD, A-GDH and TGDH protocols.