Resource-aware conference key establishment for heterogeneous networks

The Diffie-Hellman problem is often the basis for establishing conference keys. In heterogeneous networks, many conferences have participants of varying resources, yet most conference keying schemes do not address this concern and place the same burden upon less powerful clients as more powerful ones. The establishment of conference keys should minimize the burden placed on resource-limited users while ensuring that the entire group can establish the key. In this paper, we present a hierarchical conference keying scheme that forms subgroup keys for successively larger subgroups en route to establishing the group key. A tree, called the conference tree, governs the order in which subgroup keys are formed. Key establishment schemes that consider users with varying costs or budgets are built by appropriately designing the conference tree. We then examine the scenario where users have both varying costs and budget constraints. A greedy algorithm is presented that achieves near-optimal performance, and requires significantly less computational effort than finding the optimal solution. We provide a comparison of the total cost of tree-based conference keying schemes against several existing schemes, and introduce a new performance criterion, the probability of establishing the session key (PESKY), to study the likelihood that a conference key can be established in the presence of budget constraints. Simulations show that the likelihood of forming a group key using a tree-based conference keying scheme is higher than the GDH schemes of Steiner et al.. Finally, we study the effect that greedy users have upon the Huffman-based conference keying scheme, and present a method to mitigate the detrimental effects of the greedy users upon the total cost.