Self-Healing Group Key Distribution Facilitating Source Authentication Using Block Codes

Secure group key distribution is essential for many group-oriented applications such as sensor networks, multimedia broadcast services, and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. There are several challenges and requirements in designing secure group key distribution. Among them, computational efficiency, communication efficiency, adaptability to dynamic group membership change, robustness to various security threats, self-healing capacities, and source authentication are desirable. It is very challenging to design an efficient group distribution that satisfies all the requirements and challenges. Based on block codes, we propose an efficient self-healing group key distribution that facilitates both message source authentication and secure group key distribution, where the source identification and authentication can facilitate intrusion detection and identification. Both the privacy of the group key and the authentication of message sources are computationally secure. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first codes-based scheme that satisfies all the above requirements and facilitates message source authentication. The merits of the proposed scheme include the following: (1) it is highly efficient in terms of computation and communication, (2) it provides self-healing capacities for unstable environments, (3) it is very robust to various security threats and attacks, (4) it facilitates both message source authentication and secure group key distribution, and (5) it greatly improves the communication performance, compared to the state-of-the-art schemes. The security properties are analyzed, and the performance evaluations confirm its efficiency and practicality.