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On the Security of a Self-Healing Group Key Distribution Scheme

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Abstract

Recently, Wang et al. (J Secur Commun Netw 5(12):1363–1374, 2012) proposed a self-healing group key distribution (SGKD) scheme for resource-constrained wireless networks. They claimed that their proposed SGKD scheme satisfies forward security, backward security and can resist collusion attack. Unfortunately, we found some security flaws in their scheme. In this paper, we present a method to attack this scheme. The attack illustrates that this scheme does not satisfy forward security, which also directly breaks the collusion resistance capability. We also propose an improved scheme with constant storage overhead and satisfactory security.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61300172,61572027), the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (No. 20121102120017), the Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment (No.SKLSDE-2016ZX-17).

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Correspondence to Hua Guo.

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Guo, H., Zheng, Y. On the Security of a Self-Healing Group Key Distribution Scheme. Wireless Pers Commun 91, 1109–1121 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-016-3515-2

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