Toward secure group communication in wireless mobile environments: Issues, solutions, and challenges

• Categorizing group key management schemes in different design approaches.
• Pros and cons of different group key management approachs.
• Design constraints of secure group communications in wireless mobile environments.
• Review of existing group key management schemes in wireless mobile environments.
• Future challenges in developing secure group communications.

Group communication has been increasingly used as an efficient communication mechanism for facilitating emerging applications that require packet delivery from one or many sources to multiple recipients. Due to insecure communication channel, group key management which is a fundamental building block for securing group communication, has received special attention recently. Developing group key management in highly dynamic environments particularly in wireless mobile networks due to their inherent characteristics faces additional challenges. On one hand, the constraint of wireless devices in terms of resources scarcity, and on the other hand the mobility of group members increase the complexity of designing a group key management scheme. The article illustrates a survey of existing group key management schemes that specifically consider the host mobility issue in secure group communication in wireless mobile environments. The primary constraints and challenges introduced by wireless mobile environments are identified in order to show their critical influence in designing a secure group communication. The investigated schemes are then compared and analyzed against some pertinent criteria. Finally, the remaining challenges that should be tackled are outlined, and future research directions are also discussed.