RSU-Based Distributed Key Management (RDKM) For Secure Vehicular Multicast Communications

Although lots of research efforts have focused on group key management (GKM) for secure multicast, existing GKM schemes are inadequate for vehicle communication (VC) systems since they incur unnecessary rekeying overhead without considering the characteristics of VC systems such as Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communications and a great number of high mobility vehicles. Therefore, we propose a GKM scheme, called RSU-based decentralized key management (RDKM), dedicated for the multicast services in the VC systems. The RDKM scheme significantly reduces the rekeying overhead through delegating a part of the key management functions to the road-side infrastructure units (RSUs) and through updating the key encryption keys (KEKs) within a RSU. The performance of the RDKM scheme is analyzed in terms of communication overhead and storage overhead each of which has a strong impact on the performance of GKM. Furthermore, we propose an optimization algorithm that minimizes the weighted sum of the communication and the storage overhead, called the GKM overhead (GKMO), by appropriately determining the design parameters. The numerical results from the extensive analysis demonstrate that the RDKM scheme outperforms the existing GKM schemes in terms of the GKMO.