| Abstract: | In today's Internet era, group communications have become more and more essential for many emerging applications. Given the openness of today's networks, efficient and secure distribution of common key is an essential issue for secure communications in the group. To maintain confidentiality during communication in the group, all authorized members require a common key called the group key in advance. This paper proposes a group key distribution and authentication protocol for dynamic access control in secure group communication using Chinese remainder theorem (CRT), which is highly secure and computationally efficient. The proposed protocol (1) has drastically reduced the computation complexity of group controller ( GC ) and members, (2) has provided intense security by means of an additional secret parameter used by GC and members, (3) has minimized storage and communication overheads, (4) has been decentralized for higher scalability so that it can efficiently handle large‐scale changes in the group membership, and (5) is suitable for many practical applications due to intense security along with low computation and storage overheads. Detailed security analysis proves that our protocol can guarantee the privacy and security requirements of group communications. Moreover, performance analysis also verifies the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed protocol. The proposed protocol has been experimented on star topology‐based key distribution system and observed that the protocol significantly reduces the computation cost and minimizes the communication and storage overheads. |
