Group key management for wireless networks

• Main Author: Teo, Joseph Chee Ming
• Other Authors: Tan Chik How
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Wireless communication systems
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/14968
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the advancement of wireless networks in recent years, group communication via wireless networks is becoming an increasingly popular research area due to the growth of group oriented applications such as video conferencing, pay-per-view media distribution, real-time information services and collaborative work in wireless networks. Besides civilian applications mentioned above, group-oriented applications and protocols are also used widely in military operations. However, group communication via wireless networks takes place over radio waves, the common mode of communication in wireless networks, causes major security concern as radio transmission can be easily eavesdropped. Solutions such as IPSec that provides end-to-end secure communications between two communicating parties and user nodes would require many different secret keys to communicate with every other node in the network. A better solution is to use a shared secret group key for secure group communications in a wireless network. To achieve this, the nodes in the wireless network will first run a group key management (GKM) protocol to establish a common group key. This key will then be used as a secret key for symmetric-key cryptography to encrypt messages that they wish to broadcast to the wireless network. In this way, entities outside the wireless network will not be able to decode these messages.