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UBC Theses and Dissertations

P2p-hgkm : an efficient hierarchical group key management protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks Peng, Peng

Abstract

Wireless networks are growing rapidly in recent years and research in wireless technology is gaining increasing attention, especially in the area of security. Our thesis addresses an interesting security problem in wireless ad-hoc network: the P2P dynamic secure group key establishment. To secure group communication in an ad-hoc network, a group key shared by all group members is required. This group key should be updated when there are membership changes in the group, e.g. when a new member joins or a current member leaves. In this thesis, we propose a novel efficient P2P hierarchical group key management protocol for ad-hoc networks. We introduce a two-level hierarchical structure and a new scheme of group key update. The idea is to divide the group into subgroups; each maintains its subgroup key and links with other subgroups in a ring structure. A salient feature of our scheme is that group key gets updated and managed in a P2P manner. By introducing subgroups, public encryptions, and unicasts in key updates, will be limited in one subgroup and computation load is distributed to many hosts. Both theoretical analysis and experiment results show that our protocol performs well for the key establishment problem in ad-hoc network in terms of both computing cost and bandwidth overhead.

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