A template approach to group key establishment in dynamic ad-hoc groups

• Published in: 2016 IEEE 24th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) pp. 1 - 2
• Main Authors: Bezawada, Bruhadeshwar, Xiaojiang Liang, Liu, Alex, Rui Li
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.11.2016
• Subjects: Ad hoc networks; Communication system security; Conferences; Cryptography; Electronic mail; Group key establishment; Internet-of-Things; Protocols; Sensor networks; Shared secret protocols; Wireless sensor networks
• DOI: 10.1109/ICNP.2016.7784470

Fast growing communication networks like wireless ad-hoc networks and Internet-of-things (IoT) put forth new challenges in secure communication like eavesdropping and tampering attacks. For such networks, we consider the following important problem: How to establish a shared secret group key among the nodes of a dynamically formed ad-hoc group? There are two major challenges: (a) The nodes are constrained and cannot support expensive public-key operations, especially for large groups and (b) the neighborhood of an ad-hoc node is not determined a-priori and therefore, the node needs to be able to establish a group key with any dynamic sub-set of the nodes. In this work, we describe a novel template based approach to group key establishment wherein our template is a logical shared secret distribution hierarchy built on the ad-hoc nodes prior to deployment. Our template approach ensures that any given ad-hoc node shares a distinct set of secrets with any dynamic group of nodes, regardless of the physical neighborhood, after deployment. We illustrate our approach using two instantiations of symmetric secret distribution protocols namely: sub-set and dual one-way hash chain distributions.