Batch-based group key management with shared key derivation in the Internet of Things

Many applications for ad-hoc networks are based on a multicast communication paradigm, where a single source sends common data to many receivers. In these contexts, it is possible to efficiently secure the multicast communications by leveraging on a common secret key, denoted as “group key”, shared by multiple users. In this paper, we propose a novel centralized approach that efficiently addresses the problem of deriving and managing a group key in generic ad-hoc networks and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, reducing the computation overhead due to group membership changes caused by user’s joins and leaves. In particular, the proposed method takes advantage of the assumption of two possible leave strategies: (i) at a pre-determined time interval selected when the member joins the group or (ii) at any unpredictable time interval, as in the case of membership revocation.