Designing Scalable Self-healing Key Distribution Schemes with Revocation Capability

Abstract

Self-healing key distribution is a potential candidate to establish session keys for secure communication to large and dynamic groups in highly mobile, volatile and hostile wireless network, where frequent membership changes may be necessary and ability to revoke users during certain exchanges is desirable. The main property of self-healing key distribution scheme is that even if during a certain session some broadcast messages are lost due to network faults, the users are capable of recovering lost session keys on their own, without requesting additional transmission from the group manager. In this paper, we propose a scalable self-healing key distribution with t revocation capability. Our proposed scheme has improvement in storage overhead over the previous approaches with the same communication cost required by the most optimal previous scheme. The scheme is supported by a proper security analysis in an appropriate security model. We prove that it is unconditionally secure and achieve both forward secrecy and backward secrecy. Our proposed self-healing key distribution is not restricted to m sessions in Setup phase. Besides, we develop a construction for self-healing key distribution that enables key recovery from a single broadcast message.