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Lightweight and flexible key distribution schemes for secure group communications

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Abstract

Key distribution is one of the most fundamental cryptographic primitives that can establish secure group communications in both centralized and distributed networks. A one-time session key is needed to be shared among all users to protect the exchanged messages. In traditional one-to-one communication, a one-time key is shared between two users. But in modern many-to-many communication, a group key is shared among multiple users. Lightweight group key distributions are especially attractive for wireless/mobile applications, since most mobile devices only have limited power in computation and communication. But most of the existing group key distributions need to execute complicate mathematical operations. In this paper, we first present a novel design of key distribution. The basic key distribution protocol requires only logic XOR operation. Then, we show the flexibility of our basic scheme by demonstrating its applications in various network models, including both centralized and distributed key distributions. All key distribution schemes proposed in this paper are lightweight since they only require logic XOR operations. Logic operation is the most efficient operation which is much faster than the other mathematical operations. Furthermore, all our proposed schemes are non-interactive and they require the least amount of communication.

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Acknowledgements

Lein Harn and Chingfang Hsu contributed equally to this work. This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 61772224) and Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (Grant No. 2017CFB303).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science Electrical Engineering, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, MO, 64110, USA

    Lein Harn

  2. Computer School, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Chingfang Hsu

  3. School of Computer Science, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430071, China

    Zhe Xia

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  1. Lein Harn
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  2. Chingfang Hsu
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  3. Zhe Xia
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Correspondence to Chingfang Hsu.

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Harn, L., Hsu, C. & Xia, Z. Lightweight and flexible key distribution schemes for secure group communications. Wireless Netw 27, 129–136 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-020-02449-2

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