Efficient Self-healing Key Distribution with Revocation for Wireless Sensor Networks Using One Way Key Chains

Abstract

Abstract. Security of group communication for large mobile wireless sensor network hinges on efficient key distribution and key management mechanism. As the wireless medium is characterized by its lossy nature, reliable communication cannot be assumed in the key distribution schemes. Therefore, self-healing is a good property for key distribution in wireless applications. The main idea of self-healing key distribution scheme is that even if during a certain session some broadcast messages are lost due to network faults, the users are capable of recovering lost session keys on their own, without requesting additional transmission from the group manager. The only requirement for a user to recover the lost session keys, is its membership in the group both before and after the sessions in which the broadcast packets containing the keys are sent. Self-healing approach of key distribution is stateless in the sense that a user who has been off-line for some period is able to recover the lost session keys immediately after coming back on-line. In this paper, we propose two constructions for scalable self-healing key distribution with t revocation capability. The novelty of our constructions are that we apply a different and more efficient selfhealing mechanism compared to the ones in the literature using one-way key chain. The main improvements that our proposed schemes achieve over previous approaches are (a) communication bandwidth reduces from O((tj + j − t − 1) log q) to O((t + 1) log q), and (b) computation costs for our first and second constructions reduce fromwhere m is the maximum number of sessions, j is the current session number, t is the maximum number of compromised group members that may collude and q is a large prime number. We achieve this result without any increase in the storage complexity. The schemes are scalable to very large groups in highly mobile, volatile and hostile network. We prove in an appropriate security framework that our constructions are computationally secure and achieve both forward secrecy and backward secrecy.

Self-Healing Key-Distribution Scheme with Collusion Attack Resistance Based on One-Way Key Chains and Secret Sharing in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Definition 3 (t-wise backward secrecy [11]). Let J j ⊆ U denote a set of users who join the group after session j, where |J j | ≤ t. A key-distribution scheme guarantees backward secrecy if the members in J j together cannot get any information about K j , even with the knowledge of group session keys after session j.…”

“…An adversary could recover the group's session key with just broadcast messages. In [11], Dutta et al proposed two self-healing, key-distribution schemes with revocation that were secure, but they did not consider collusion attacks. In [12], Dutta et al proposed a new self-healing key-distribution scheme with a constant storage overhead by using only one secret polynomial.…”

“…Any user can recover the manager's secret polynomial, which should not been known by any user. Xu and He (2009) proposed two schemes in [13], one of which improved the scheme in [12] by using an access polynomial instead of the revocation polynomial with the other, which was based on the scheme in [11], still using an access polynomial. But neither of the two schemes proposed in [13] considered collusion attacks between the revoked user and the newly-joined user.…”

KALwEN+: Practical Key Management Schemes for Gossip-Based Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

“…Since we suppose the added/removed nodes might be tampered, the resilience of compromise becomes serious in WMSN key management. Secondly, a typical WMSN is a moderate-scale WSN, so probabilistic key sharing schemes that are designed for large-scale WSNs are not suitable [6,7,12]. For practical applications, a good WMSN key management scheme must consider the above differences carefully, whilst balancing the applicability and the security.…”

Trade-off between collusion resistance and user life cycle in self-healing key distributions with t-revocation

“…Further improvements in efficiency are obtained by relaxing the security slightly -from unconditional to computational [8], [5], [10]. The schemes [12], [13], [17] are based on vector space access structure instead of Shamir's [14] secret sharing.…”