Self-healing group key distribution protocol in wireless sensor networks for secure IoT communications

The Internet of Things(IoT) aims to collect a large amount of data and exchange them over wireless networks by connecting billions of perception objects. Security becomes essential for IoT since unreliable wireless networks often create insecure connections. To ensure the group communication security and improve the communication efficiency, self-healing group key distribution (SGKD) protocols are introduced for unreliable wireless networks. In such scheme, lost session keys can be recovered from the current broadcast messages by the group members, instead of requiring the missing key updating messages to be retransmitted by the group manager. A lot of access-polynomial-based SGKD (AP-SGKD) protocols have been proposed. Unfortunately, almost all of them have secure problems. This paper proposes a new AP-SGKD protocol using double chains and access polynomial. The new protocol is the first AP-SGKD protocol which satisfies all basic security properties with optimal storage requirement. In addition, we propose a method to trade off the session key recovering time for less communication cost. The simulation results show that the new scheme can be applied to Zigbee network since it has a good performance on security, storage efficiency and communication efficiency.