On the security of group communication schemes based on symmetric key cryptosystems

Many emerging applications in both wired and wireless networks, such as information dissemination and distributed collaboration in an adversarial environment, need support of secure group communications. There have been many such schemes in the setting of wired networks. These schemes can be directly adopted in, or appropriately adapted to, the setting of wireless networks such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and sensor networks. In this paper we show that the popular group communication schemes that we have examined are vulnerable to the following attack: an outsider adversary who compromises a legitimate group member could obtain some or all past group keys as well as the current group key; this is in sharp contrast to the widelyaccepted belief that a such adversary can only obtain the current group key. This attack is very powerful also because it provides the adversary the following flexibility: since the adversary knows which members are the “most valuable” ones from its ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SASN
• Authors: Shouhuai Xu
• Keywords: Current Group Keys, Group Communication, Group Communication Schemes, SASN 2005