An Efficient Group Key Agreement Scheme for MANETs Based on Merkle Identity Tree

Designing efficient and secure group key agreement scheme is one of the key issues in mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, the Merkle identity tree is firstly introduced, then an efficient scheme based on Merkle identity tree is proposed. With this scheme, the direct and secure communications between any subgroups without retransmission could be implemented. The security of the scheme can be assured under the complexity assumptions. The detailed analysis of the initialization procedure, subgroup key agreement procedure, group communication procedure and rekeying procedure when membership changes, including joining and leaving, shows that the scheme is efficient in computation and communication cost.