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Computation-efficient key establishment in wireless group communications

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Abstract

Efficient key establishment is an important problem for secure group communications. The communication and storage complexity of group key establishment problem has been studied extensively. In this paper, we propose a new group key establishment protocol whose computation complexity is significantly reduced. Instead of using classic secret sharing, the protocol only employs a linear secret sharing scheme, using Vandermonde Matrix, to distribute group key efficiently. This protocol drastically reduces the computation load of each group member and maintains at least the same security degree compared to existing schemes employing traditional secret sharing. The security strength of this scheme is evaluated in detail. Such a protocol is desirable for many wireless applications where portable devices or sensors need to reduce their computation as much as possible due to battery power limitations. This protocol provides much lower computation complexity while maintaining low and balanced communication complexity and storage complexity for secure group key establishment.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the self-determined research funds of CCNU from the colleges’ basic research and operation of MOE, under Grant CCNU15ZD003 and CCNU15A02018, and the major Project of national social science fund, under Grant 12&2D223.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer School, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China

    Ching-Fang Hsu, Maoyuan Zhang & Xuan Zhu

  2. Department of Computer Science Electrical Engineering, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, MO, USA

    Lein Harn

  3. School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Australia

    Yi Mu

Authors
  1. Ching-Fang Hsu
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  2. Lein Harn
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  3. Yi Mu
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  4. Maoyuan Zhang
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  5. Xuan Zhu
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Correspondence to Ching-Fang Hsu.

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Hsu, CF., Harn, L., Mu, Y. et al. Computation-efficient key establishment in wireless group communications. Wireless Netw 23, 289–297 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-016-1223-1

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