Denial-of-service resilience password-based group key agreement for wireless networks

Abstract

Wireless networks are very convenient as they allow mobile users to be connected whenever and wherever they desire. Group key agreement (GKA) protocols are used in these networks to allow secure group communications among the wireless nodes. Password-based authentication for GKA protocols provide better solutions than digital signature authentication as password-based solutions do not require Public Key Infrastructure and are less computationally intensive. However, GKA protocols, including password-based GKA protocols, are susceptible to Denial-of-Service(DoS) attacks that can disrupt GKA services, and most current GKA protocols, including password-based GKA protocols, do not provide protection against DoS attacks. Besides DoS attacks, password-based GKA protocols are also susceptible to on-line and off-line password guessing attacks. Currently, most password-based GKA protocols are secure only against off-line password guessing attacks. In this paper, we present an authenticated password-based GKA protocol that provides protection against DoS attacks and is secure against both on-line and off-line password guessing attacks. Our proposed protocol, which uses a hierarchical group model, also provides key confirmation and is energy efficient and scalable. Unlike current communication energy analysis that combine energy costs for point-to-point (P2P) and broadcast communications (transmission and reception) together, our communication energy analysis separates P2P and broadcast communications to provide more detailed study on communications in GKA. Both the complexity analysis and energy costs analysis of the proposed protocol with two other password-based GKA schemes show that our proposed protocol is more efficient and suitable for wireless networks.