Abstract: This paper considers the key management issue of secure group communication in a highly mobile networking environment. In such environment, there are frequent joining and leaving of members due to roaming or suspending for a period. Inorder to preserve forward and backward confidentiality, it is necessary to rekey every time a member joins or leaves. This paper introduces a new state-based group key management framework suitable for highly mobile environment. In this scheme, a member enters "Park" state when it is going to roam or suspend for a period, when it becomes active again, it send a request to the key server to get the current group key and changes its state to "Active" again. No rekeying is needed for a roaming, and reliable delivery of rekeying messages is not required for "Park" members. The scheme can notably reduce the communication overhead and provide an efficient method for error recovery.

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• TN918.91