A middleware service for secure group communication in mobile ad hoc networks

Secure group communication (SGC) is required in many applications using mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Due to the mobility and limited resources of mobile devices used by group members, secure groups in a MANET may be required to be set up and maintained dynamically, and applications requiring SGC may request to change the secure groups according to network and application status. In this paper, a secure group model is presented to describe common characteristics of secure groups based on hierarchical authentication relations among the members in each secure group. Based on this model, a middleware service for SGC is developed to set up and maintain secure groups automatically and support development and runtime of applications using SGC in MANETs. This middleware service is implemented in a context-sensitive middleware RCSM. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.