Multigroup rekeying for a wireless network

  • Authors:

  • Kuang-Hui Chi;Ji-Han Jiang;Yu-Ching Hsu

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Formosa University, Taiwan;Information and Communications Research Laboratories, Industrial Technology Research Institute, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • NBiS'07 Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Network-based information systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

In the context of secure group communication, a shared secret key is generated anew for data protection whenever group membership changes. This paper presents an approach to fast rekeying in a wireless network that is subject to time-varying channel conditions. We address a scenario where a station joins one group at a time, but may leave multiple groups at once for abrupt link failure or cascading application termination. In our architecture, each station is assigned a private number and a code, so as to exploit Fermat's Little Theorem and an orthogonal coding methodology, respectively. The former is used to protect the delivery of updated group keys, while the latter to encode keying material meant for different sites in an aggregate form as a payload for message distribution. Since rekeying messages are delivered via multicast, intended stations can decode information of interest at the same time. Therefore rekeying among multiple groups can still be carried out timely with O(1) message complexity. Our design provides a complementary facility to current schemes for performance improvement. Pragmatic considerations of our approach are discussed as well.