Self-Healing Key Distribution Scheme Based on the Key-Chain Tree in Unreliable Wireless Networks

Distributing session keys for secure communication in an unreliable wireless network is a challenging issue due to the traffic congestion and the security problem. The self-healing key distribution is an efficient technique to reduce the traffic and provide good security performance. In this paper, we propose a new self-healing key distribution scheme based on the key-chain tree (KCT) for wireless networks. In the proposed scheme, group manager selects keys to encrypt session keys according to the position of revoked users in the KCT. Simulation results show that compared to existing schemes, the proposed scheme achieves a higher flexibility and a lower communication overhead.