Multicasting is increasingly used as an efficient communication mechanism for group-oriented applications in the Internet. In order to offer secrecy for multicast applications, the traffic encryption key has to be changed whenever a user joins or leaves the system. Such a change has to be communicated to all the current group members. The bandwidth used for such rekeying operation could be high...

We present the SEcure communicAtion Library (SEAL) [source can be downloaded from: http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~cslui/ ANSRlab/software/SEAL/], a Linux-based C language application programming interface (API) library that implements secure group key agreement algorithms that allow a communication group to periodically renew a common secret group key for secure and private communication. The grou...

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently gained popularity for a wide spectrum of applications. Monitoring tasks can be performed in various environments. This may be beneficial in many scenarios, but it certainly exhibits new challenges in terms of security due to increased data transmission over the wireless channel with potentially unknown threats. Among possible security issues are tim...

Multicasting is increasingly used as an efficient communication mechanism for group-oriented applications in the Internet. In order to offer secrecy for multicast applications, the traffic encryption key has to be changed whenever a user joins or leaves the system. Such a change has to be communicated to all the current users. The bandwidth used for such rekeying operation could be high when th...

Attribute based systems enable fine-grained access control among a group of users each identified by a set of attributes. Secure collaborative applications need such flexible attribute based systems for managing and distributing group keys. However, current group key management schemes are not well designed to manage group keys based on the attributes of the group members. In this paper, we pro...

The 802.11 standard defines the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and encapsulation of data frames. It is intended to provide data privacy to the level of a wired network. WEP suffered threat of attacks from hackers owing to certain security shortcomings in the WEP protocol. Lately, many new protocols like WiFi Protected Access (WPA), WPA2, Robust Secure Network (RSN) and 802.11i have come into be...

Security is an increasingly important attribute for multimedia applications that require prevention of unauthorized access to copyrighted data. Two approaches have been used to protect scalable video content in distribution: Partial encryption and progressive encryption. Partial encryption provides protection for only selected portions of the video. Progressive encryption allows transcoding wit...

In this paper, we propose a novel key management scheme based on genetic algorithms to fulfill the requirement of power control, memory usage, and computation security in a hierarchical wireless sensor network. We divide our scheme into three parts: the sink node, the header nodes and the sensor nodes. The sink node first uses genetic algorithms to generate appropriate key-generating functions,...

The problem of efficiently and securely broadcasting to remote cooperative group occurs in many newly emerging networks. A major challenge in devising such systems is to overcome the obstacles of the potentially limited communication from the group to the sender, the unavailability of a fully trusted key generation center, and the dynamics of the sender. The existing key management paradigms ca...

With reference to a distributed architecture consisting of sensor nodes connected in a wireless network, we present a model of a protection system based on segments and applications. An application is the result of the joint activities of a set of cooperating nodes. A given node can access a segment stored in the primary memory of a different node only by presenting a gate for that segment. A g...