A Novel Approach towards Multilevel Access Control for Secure Group Communication Using Symmetric Polynomial Based Elliptic Curve Cryptography

This paper addresses an interesting security problem in communication networks: Multilevel Access control for secure group communication. Multilevel access control allows members belonging to a higher level hierarchy to see the message transfers going on between the users who are under their control . This type of scenario is very common in corporate organizations and also in government agencies like defense. For this, two things are needed i) a group key shared by all group members is required. This group key should be updated when there are membership changes (when the new member joins or current member leaves) in the group ii) It should be possible for the ancestors of a group to derive the group key of the descendants node whereas the vice versa is not allowed . In this paper, We propose a novel, secure, scalable and efficient Symmetric Polynomial Based Elliptic Curve Cryptographic protocol (SPECC) for communication networks. This is implemented by having the central authority to have a secret polynomial distributed among the different groups. The symmetric polynomial value is not an ordinary value but, it in fact represents points in an elliptic curve. Using this point the message transfer takes place among the group members. The higher level group members are able to derive the group key of the lower level users by applying the symmetric polynomial scheme. To avoid congestion a node acts as a group controller for a group which calculates group key to pass on to the group members of the group . The ancestral group controllers derive the group keys and pass it on to the group members to enable them to see the messages. Using this approach, messages and key updates will be limited within subgroup and outer group. Hence computation load is distributed among many hosts. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results show that SPECC performs better for the Multilevel Access Control problem in terms of security, memory cost, computation cost and communication cost.