Fault-Tolerant Extension of Hypercube for Secure and Reliable Group Communications

Abstract

Securing group communications in resource constrained, infrastructure-less mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has become one of the most challenging research directions in the areas of wireless networking and security. MANETs are emerging as the desired environment for an increasing number of commercial and military applications, addressing also an increasing number of users. Security on the other hand, is becoming an indispensable requirement of our modern life for all these applications. The inherent limitations of MANETs impose major difficulties on establishing a suitable secure group communications framework. We contribute to the latter by extending hypercube, an existing key agreement (KA) scheme - all parties contribute equally to the group key - to tolerate multiple member failures with low cost. We achieve this by enhancing hypercube with a novel adaptively proactive algorithm. Members are assumed to be already authenticated via some underlying mechanism and we only focus on the design and analysis of a fault-tolerant scheme. Our algorithm has been evaluated and compared with the existing approach. Through our analysis and simulations we demonstrate its superiority in terms of robustness and efficiency.