Design of self-healing key distribution schemes (Q1877337)

Secure communication of a group of users requires an appropriate scheme to distribute session keys. However, in practice some additional requirements make the problem even harder -- e.g. if instead of a static group of users one considers a dynamic one. However, almost all known approaches assume that the underlying communication network is reliable. Recently, the notion of {self-healing key distribution schemes} has been proposed to enable a dynamic group of users to establish a group key over an unreliable network. The paper analyzes existing constructions of the self-healing schemes and shows some weakness as well as an attack that can be applied to the basic construction. Then, a new mechanism for implementing the self-healing approach is proposed. In this approach instead of sending (with every broadcast message) shares for recovering past and future session keys, one sends additional information which enables the users to recover lost keys from two received broadcast messages. Based on this idea an efficient construction which is optimal in terms of user memory is given. Finally, the self-healing model is slightly extended and a new scheme which enables a user to recover from a single broadcast message all keys associated with sessions in which he is a member of the group is shown.