Secure Group Communication in Ad-Hoc Networks using Tree Parity Machines

A fundamental building block of secure group communication is the establishment of a common group key. This can be divided into key agreement and key distribution. Common group key agreement protocols are based on the Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange and extend it to groups. Group key distribution protocols are centralized approaches which make use of one or more special key servers. In contrast to these approaches, we present a protocol which makes use of the Tree Parity Machine key exchange between multiple parties. It does not need a centralized server and therefore is especially suitable for ad-hoc networks of any kind.