An Efficient and Secure Self-Healing Scheme for LKH

With the growing interest in converging fixed and mobile networks (FMC), mobile applications will require more and more resources from both the network and the mobile device. In such context, multicasting is essential because it lowers bandwidth consumption by simultaneously reaching a group of multiple recipients. Securing multicast flows has been extensively studied in the past, but none of the existing solutions were meant to handle the constraints imposed by mobile scenarios, in particular the high packet-loss rate. The need for a low overhead self-healing rekeying mechanism that is scalable, reliable and suitable for mobile environments has never been more urgent than with the arrival of FMC in 4G networks. This paper presents two self-healing recovery schemes based on the dual directional hash chains (DDHC) for the logical key hierarchy (LKH) rekeying protocol. This enables a member that has missed up to m consecutive key updates to recover the missing decryption keys without asking the group controller key server (GCKS) for retransmission. Conducted simulations show considerable improvements in the ratio of decrypted messages and in the rekey message overhead in high packet loss environments.