A cluster based cost effective contributory key agreement protocol for secure group communication

In a Heterogeneous distributed Environment, communication between the group members must be secured and authenticated. In a group, the member contribution in forming the group key is important. But forming a group key in a efficient manner is and to minimize the complexity in forming the group key, we are proposing a new protocol which consumes minimum number of key computations, less communication costs and number of keys stored in a server. Group members are in dynamic nature even one join/ leave the group the group key must be revoked and the new must be generated to maintain the forward and backward secrecy. If group members are large then the scalability problem also arises. In particular, cost for key establishment and key renewing is usually relevant to the group size and subsequently becomes a performance bottleneck in achieving scalability. To address this problem, for wired / wireless communication our new approach that features decoupling of group size and computation cost for group key management. By using a Cluster based Hierarchical Key Distribution Protocol, the load of key management can be shared by a cluster of dummy nodes without revealing group messages to them. The proposed scheme provides better scalability because the Key Computation cost is log₈ [n|m] and Communication cost is 0(1), the key server storage cost is [d/d -1]m+n, n ≫m. Our proposed protocol provides the best performance in communication, key computations and the key server storage cost than existing approaches and it is applicable for wired / wireless environments also.