A novel collusion-resilient architecture for secure group communication in wireless ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Current architectures for secure group communication schemes have been designed with both the Internet and network-level multicast as an underlying infrastructure. However, such schemes may not be suitable for wireless ad-hoc networks (WAHNs) which are now increasingly being used in several information sensitive applications. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for secure group communication in WAHNs with no network-level multicast support. For improved efficiency and scalability, our architecture integrates secure multicast functions with group management tasks at the application layer. The architecture consists of key generation and key distribution schemes, which we developed in an earlier work. Here, we introduce a new collusion resistant key assignment protocol for a clustered WAHN. We show its implementability, scalability for communication and storage costs, and suitability for WAHNs.