A Robust and Stateless Self-Healing Group Key Management Scheme

Abstract

Self-healing group key management (GKM) is a newly appeared mechanism for secure group communication (SGC). It allows a group member to recover a lost session key from the key materials of previous and/or subsequent sessions. Self-healing is important when SGC operates under an unreliable environment where the transmission channel is failure-prone and messages may get lost/damaged during the transmission. This paper proposes a new self-healing scheme which is based on a novel concept/construction of access polynomial. Unlike the existing self healing SGC schemes, the new proposed scheme is stateless, thus, being robust. It overcomes some shortcomings existing in the existing schemes yet still possesses all the advantages of them.