Batch-based group key management with shared key derivation in the Internet of Things

Many applications for ad-hoc networks are based on a multicast communication paradigm, where a single source sends common data to many receivers. In these contexts, it is possible to efficiently secure the multicast communications by leveraging on a common secret key, denoted as “group key”, shared by multiple users. In this paper, we propose a novel centralized approach that efficiently addresses the problem of deriving and managing a group key in generic ad-hoc networks and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, reducing the computation overhead due to group membership changes caused by user´s joins and leaves. In particular, the proposed method takes advantage of the assumption of two possible leave strategies: (i) at a pre-determined time interval selected when the member joins the group or (ii) at any unpredictable time interval, as in the case of membership revocation.