Group Rekeying Scheme for Dynamic Peer Group Security in Collaborative Networks

Contributory group key management schemes are popularly used for dynamic peer group communications in collaborative environments. Previous contributory group key management schemes require every group member to perform a number of expensive Diffie-Hellman operations whenever the group membership changes. This is not always affordable for devices in resource-constrained networks. In this paper, we present an efficient group key management scheme, in which most group members process one way hash functions and only a few members perform Diffie-Hellman operations. Our proposal is an extension of the Tree-based Group Diffie-Hellman (TGDH) technique. Performance analyses and experimental results show that our approach achieves a new performance minimum, while guaranteeing the same level of security as other approaches.