A Simple Group Key Management Approach for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Securing communications among a group of nodes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is challenging due to the lack of trusted infrastructure. Group key management is one of the basic building blocks in securing group communications. A group key is a common secret used in cryptographic algorithms. Group key management involves creating and distributing the common secret for all group members. Change of membership requires the group key being refreshed to ensure backward and forward secrecy. In this paper, we extend our previous work with new protocols. Our basic idea is that each group member does not need to order intermediate keys and can deduce the group key locally. A multicast tree is formed for efficient and reliable message dissemination.