ECDH-based Scalable Distributed Key Management Scheme for Secure Group Communication

With the popularity of group-oriented  applications, secure and efficient communication among all  group members has become a major issue. An efficient key  management mechanism is the base and critical technology  of secure group communications. A distributed grouporiented  key management scheme without the participation  of third parties is proposed in the paper. The scheme  deploys Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) which is  more lightweight compared to regular Diffie-Hellman. The  approach includes group key establishment and rekeying  algorithms when there are membership changes. By using a  distributed architecture, the load of key management is  reduced. Specifically, the scheme can be extended to hybrid  architecture to provide better scalability. Consequently, the  extended scheme is both fault-tolerant and efficient in terms  of integrity and confidentiality. In all protocol suites, the  shared group key is calculated by scalar multiplication.  According to performance comparisons with other schemes,  the proposed scheme dramatically reduces communication  overhead and computational costs. Security analysis  indicates that the proposal provides a number of desirable  security properties, including group key secrecy, forward  secrecy and backward secrecy.

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