A Scalable Key Agreement Scheme for Large Scale Networks

Key agreement is a central problem to build up secure infrastructures for networks. Public key technology is not suitable because of its computation inefficiency and the lack of central authorities in distributed scenarios. Conventional distributed symmetric key agreement models try to achieve key agreement between any pair of nodes without interactions. They lack the scalability because of their memory cost of N - 1 in a network of N nodes, and thus only suitable and optimum in small networks. In this paper, we propose a novel symmetric key agreement scheme, which is scalable for large scale networks with very small memory cost per node. We show that for a network of N nodes our scheme has only O(knthrootN) memory cost per node, where k ges 1. Conventional distributed models can be derived as special cases of our scheme