Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 1/09/2017 |
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<mark>Journal</mark> | Cluster Computing |
Issue number | 3 |
Volume | 20 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Pages (from-to) | 2779-2792 |
Publication Status | Published |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
To accomplish secure group communication, it is essential to share a unique cryptographic key among group members. The underlying challenges to group key agreement are scalability, efficiency, and security. In a dynamic group environment, the rekeying process is more frequent; therefore, it is more crucial to design an efficient group key agreement protocol. Moreover, with the emergence of various group-based services, it is becoming common for several multicast groups to coexist in the same network. These multicast groups may have several shared users; a join or leave request by a single user can trigger regeneration of multiple group keys. Under the given circumstances the rekeying process becomes a challenging task. In this work, we propose a novel methodology for group key agreement which exploits the state vectors of group members. The state vector is a set of randomly generated nonce instances which determine the logical link between group members and which empowers the group member to generate multiple cryptographic keys independently. Using local knowledge of a secret nonce, each member can generate and share a large number of secure keys, indicating that SGRS inherently provides a considerable amount of secure subgroup multicast communication using subgroup multicasting keys derived from local state vectors. The resulting protocol is secure and efficient in terms of both communication and computation.