A novel linear multi-secret sharing scheme for group communication in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as an increasingly important technology that offers low-cost community wireless services. The community-oriented nature of WMNs facilitates group applications, such as webcast, distance learning, online gaming, video conferencing, and multimedia broadcasting. Security is critical for the deployment of these services. Secure group communication has become an important component in WMNs. In order to provide secure and efficient group communication in WMNs, in this paper we consider an ideal linear multi-secret sharing scheme, in which each authorized subset may have different target secret. In particular, we put forward a general method of construction for such a scheme by using monotone span programs. The correctness and security of proposed scheme are proved. & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.