Self-healing key distribution with revocation

We address the problem of establishing a group key amongst a dynamic group of users over an unreliable, or lossy, network. We term our key distribution mechanisms self-healing because users are capable of recovering lost group keys on their own, without requesting additional transmissions from the group manager thus cutting back on network traffic, decreasing the load on the group manager and reducing the risk of user exposure through traffic analysis. A user must be a member both before and after the session in which a particular key is sent in order to be able to recover the key through self-healing. Binding the ability to recover keys to membership status enables the group manager to use short broadcasts to establish group keys, independent of the group size. In addition, the self-healing approach to key distribution is stateless, meaning that a group member who has been off-line for some time is able to recover new session keys immediately after coming back on-line.