One-way hash chain-based self-healing group key distribution scheme with collusion resistance capability in wireless sensor networks

In order to resolve the collusion resistance problem in the one-way hash chain-based self-healing group key distribution schemes and improve the performance of previous self-healing group key distribution schemes, we propose a self-healing group key distribution scheme based on the revocation polynomial and a special one-way hash key chain for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in this paper. In our proposed scheme, by binding the time at which the user joins the group with the capability of recovering previous group session keys, a new method is addressed to provide the capability of resisting the collusion attack between revoked users and new joined users, and a special one-way hash chain utilization method and some new methods to construct the personal secret, the revocation polynomial and the key updating broadcast packet are presented. Compared with existing schemes under same conditions, our proposed scheme not only supports more revoked users and sessions, but also provides a stronger security. Moreover, our proposed scheme reduces the communication overhead, and is especially suited for a large scale WSN in bad environments where a strong collusion attack resistance capability is required and many users will be revoked.