A Secure Group Communication Framework in Private Personal Area Networks (P-PANs)

One of the next promising generation networks is personal networks where a user can make ad-hoc networks with his/her personal devices. However, the present security mechanism does not consider at all what happens whenever a mobile node (device) is compromised, lost or stolen. Since a user may hold many different types of devices, the leakage of stored secrets sometimes results in the complete breakdown of the intended security level. For that, we propose two Leakage-Resilient and Forward-Secure Authenticated Key Exchange (LRFS-AKE1 and LRFS-AKE2) protocols where the former is used to authenticate a device when its owner is present whereas the latter is used in the other case. These protocols guarantee not only forward secrecy of the shared key between device and its server but also a new additional layer of security against leakage of stored secrets. Furthermore, we give a secure group communication framework, based on the LRFS-AKE1 and LRFS-AKE2 protocols, in Private Personal Area Networks (P-PANs) which provides a group key privacy against the involved server who does not deviate the protocol.