Recently there have been a noticeable growth of ad-hoc environments with peer-to-peer relations. Such environments decentralize the services in order to share their cost between their members. As a result, a decentralized security scheme for the group members must be also provided. Group Key Management (GKM) deals with the responsibility of providing privacy and group authentication in group communications, but until now it is based either in centralized solutions, useless for peer-to-peer groups, or in contributory key schemes, that require a known group size. We propose a GKM algorithm targeted to ad-hoc environments that it is decentralized and allows members to only know their one-hop neighbors. Moreover our presented algorithm can deal with the potential mobility of the ad-hoc devices.

Peer Reviewed