How to Get G roup K ey E fficiently in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Securing Group communications in mobile ad - hoc networks (MANETs) continues attract ing researcher s' attention s due to its importance in many critical applications . Y et, the nature lack ing a key management center ma k e s it a challeng e in terms of group key management problem in MANETs . Although r ecent advance s in certificateless public key cryptography (CL - PKC) shed light on lightweight group key management issues, most of the m depend on the bilinear pairing during their operations, which were not suitable for resource constrained nodes in MANETs due to the heavy c omputation overhead. T his paper proposes a Huffman - tree - based pairing free authenticated certificateless group key agreement protocol (HPF - CLGKA) to establish ing the group key efficiently. Neither pairing operation nor the signature for authentication is u se d during the protocol execution, which will cut down the computation overheads greatly . Moreover, the Huffman key tree further minimizes the negotiation rounds and therefore reduces computation and communication costs. Through these measures, group key e stablishment and rekeying efficiencies are greatly improv ed .