A secure group key management scheme in ad hoc networks

Many emerging mobile wireless applications for emergency and military situations depend upon secure group communications. But group key management in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) faces a great challenge because of unreliable links, malicious act and multi-hop communications. Based on the verifiable secret sharing mechanism, a novel group key management scheme named DVGKM (distributed verifiable group key management) is proposed in this paper, in which each entity holds a secret share and multiple entities in a local neighborhood can jointly update the group key. DVGKM can be robust in a hostile environment where the topologic structure of network is continually changed. Simulation results demonstrate that DVGKM is better than other algorithms and protocols in the group rekeying success rate.