Secure broadcast in distributed networks with strong adversaries

This paper proposes a framework that enables secure one-to-many communication for networks with limited capabilities in the face of a strong adversary that can capture an arbitrary set of nodes. Our approach consists of two main components: (a) group key establishment protocol and (b) special key management. Especially, we try to address the following question: How strong of security properties can we achieve for broadcast communication in hardware-limited networks with a strong adversary? We propose approaches and their variants that neither require special hardware nor use costly cryptographic operations. With thorough security and efficiency analyses, we discuss how our solutions can be applied to a variety of hardware-limited distributed systems. We also describe the implementation and evaluation results of the most promising variants. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.