A new self-healing key distribution scheme

A self-healing key distribution scheme enables a group of users to establish a group key over an unreliable channel. In such a protocol, a group manager, to distribute a session key to each member of the group, broadcasts packets along the channel. If some packet gets lost, the users are still capable of recovering the group key using the received packets, without requesting additional transmission from the group manager. A user must be member both before and after the session in which a particular key is sent and lost, in order to be recovered through "self-healing". In this paper we propose a new technique to do self-healing, and we provide a secure and efficient scheme.