The Albakri-Harn key pre-distribution scheme is insecure

04/12/2020

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by   Chris J Mitchell, et al.

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The Albakri-Harn group key pre-distribution protocol, which enables any subset of a predefined set of nodes to establish a shared secret key, is shown to be fundamentally flawed. A pair of colluding nodes can compute group keys for all the groups of which they are not members, which breaks a fundamental design objective of the scheme. Repairing the scheme appears difficult, if not impossible. The existence of major flaws is not surprising given the complete absence of any rigorous proofs of security for the proposed scheme.