Title: User driven general framework to cap the joins in secure group communication

Authors: Payal Sharma; B.R. Purushothama

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Goa, Farmagudi, Ponda, Goa, 403401, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Goa, Farmagudi, Ponda, Goa, 403401, India

Abstract: In the literature, secure group key management schemes have focused on either rekeying cost or security requirements, i.e., forward and backward secrecy. There is little or no work that adds new features to the secure group key management scheme. In the existing key management schemes, any user can join or leave the group any number of times during the group's lifetime. There is a need to restrict the number of times a user joins the group during the group's lifetime. We propose a user-driven general framework wherein a cap is enforced on the number of times a user can join the group. Any existing key management scheme can use this framework. In the proposed scheme, the user is prevented from joining a group, say, more than t > 0 times. We analyse the scheme and show that the proposed scheme indeed caps the number of times a user can join the group.

Keywords: secure group communication; entry restriction; Shamir's secret sharing; verifiable secret sharing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2024.137722

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2024 Vol.23 No.2, pp.190 - 199

Received: 29 Jun 2022
Accepted: 20 Oct 2022
Published online: 04 Apr 2024 *

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