A Mechanism for Communication-Efficient Broadcast Encryption over Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Due to its low communication cost, stateful broadcast encryption is an appealing solution for secure content distribution in mobile ad hoc wireless networks (MANETs). Unfortunately, the inherent limitations of MANETs prevent a standard application of such schemes since they require receivers to be online. In this paper, we present a reliable message delivery mechanism for MANETs that is based on erasure codes and that leverages node mobility in order to achieve non-interactive recovery of missed messages. We then show how our mechanism can be used to reliably deliver the key updates of a stateful broadcast encryption scheme. Our solution has several useful properties: it allows trade-offs between the amount of storage required at each node and the speed of message recovery; and it has the ability to leverage the resources of unauthorized nodes. We evaluate the performance of our approach through simulation, and show that it achieves good performance for networks with high node density.