An Efficient Self-Healing Key Distribution Scheme

Self-healing key distribution schemes enable a group user to recover session keys from two broadcast messages it received before and after those sessions, even if broadcast messages for middle sessions are lost due to network failure. These schemes are quite suitable for supporting secure communication over unreliable networks such as sensor networks and ad hoc networks. An efficient self-healing key distribution scheme is proposed in this paper. The scheme based on the concept of access polynomial and self-healing key distribution model constructed by Hong et al. The new scheme reduces communication overhead and computation overhead greatly yet still keeps the constant storage overhead. In addition, we consider the possibility of mutual-healing between neighbor users in wireless networks.