Autonomic Group Key Management in Deep Space DTN

In deep space delay tolerant networks rekeying expend vast amounts of energy and delay time as a reliable end-to-end communication is very difficult to be available between members and key management center. In order to deal with the question, this paper puts forwards an autonomic group key management scheme for deep space DTN, in which a logical key tree based on one-encryption-key multi-decryption-key key protocol is presented. Each leaf node with a secret decryption key corresponds to a network member and each non-leaf node corresponds to a public encryption key generated by all leaf node’s decryption keys that belong to the non-leaf node’s sub tree. In the proposed scheme, each legitimate member has the same capability of modifying public encryption key with himself decryption key as key management center, so rekeying can be fulfilled successfully by a local leaving or joining member in lack of key management center support. In the security aspect, forward security and backward security are guaranteed. In the efficiency aspect, our proposed scheme’s rekeying message cost is half of LKH scheme when a new member joins, furthermore in member leaving event a leaving member makes tradeoff between computation cost and message cost except for rekeying message cost is constant and is not related to network scale. Therefore, our proposed scheme is more suitable for deep space DTN than LKH and the localization of rekeying is realized securely.