Abstract: Self-healing group key distribution enables group of users to establish group session keys for secure communication over an unreliable networks. Based on a secret sharing method with access structures in which each user's secret shadow is selected by the user himself, a self-healing group key distribution scheme was proposed. The scheme enables each group member's personal secret key is selected by the member himself, the group manager dose not have to distribute each member's personal secret key,no secure channel is required to be established between the group manager and each member. The security of the scheme was analyzed in a system security model, the analysis results show that it is a computational secure self-healing group key distribution scheme with revocation capability and achieves both forward and backward secrecy. Finally, the performance analysis results show that the proposed scheme has less storage cost and communication cost.

Key words: Group key distribution, Self-healing, Secret sharing, Access structures