Babak, Daghighi (2016) A hierarchical group key management with host mobility protocol in wireless mobile environment / Babak Daghighi. PhD thesis, University of Malaya.
Abstract
Group communication has been increasingly used as an efficient communication means for facilitating emerging applications that require packet delivery from one or many sources to multiple recipients. Due to insecure communication channels, group key management schemes have recently received special attention as a fundamental building block to preserve secrecy of group communication. Developing group key management in highly dynamic environments particularly in wireless mobile networks due to their inherent complexities faces additional challenges. On one hand, the constraint of wireless devices in terms of resources scarcity, and on the other, the mobility of group members complicates design of a group key management scheme. While a multitude effort has been given to establish a secure group communication in wired network environments, few attempts have been made to extend the group key management scheme to wireless mobile environments to explicitly address the member mobility issue. The aim of this research is to propose a group key management scheme that addresses the mobility issues. This work involves four main parts. First, an introduction is given to group communication to recognize its capabilities as an efficient type of communication. Then the research activities pertaining to group key management schemes are explored to distinguish various design approaches along with the advantages and disadvantages related to each approach particularly when they are developed for wireless mobile environments. Second, the investigation is continued by scrutinizing the existing solutions that take consideration host mobility issue, and identifying the remaining weaknesses pertaining to each scheme. Then, the focus goes toward the primary constraints and challenges involved in adapting and developing a group key management scheme for wireless mobile environments. Third, a group key management scheme is proposed and designed for establishing secure group communication suitable for infrastructure-based wireless mobile environments. This scheme identifies an overall architecture, which includes the main components and their roles, trust and keying relationships, as well as detailed functional requirements. The main protocols required within the scheme are then described in detail. Finally, a simulation analysis is conducted to assess HIMOB with regard to the security requirement, and the performance requirements. The impact of group size variation and mobility rate variation are studied on the average of rekeying messages generated per each event and 1-affects-n phenomenon. The results obtained from the simulation experiments show HIMOB surpasses the other existing solutions with minimizing the number of rekeying messages sent and the number members affected on each event. The security requirements studies also show the backward and forward secrecy is preserved in HIMOB even though the members move between areas. The research work is concluded by outlining the future research direction.
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