Future Generation Computer Systems 84 (2018) 123–125

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Future Generation Computer Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fgcs

Editorial

Key management and key distribution for secure group

communication in mobile and cloud network
P. Vijayakumar a , Victor Chang b , L. Jegatha Deborah a , Bharat S. Rawal Kshatriya c
a
University College of Engineering Tindivanam, Tamilnadu, India
b
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China
c
Penn State University, Abington, PA, USA

article info a b s t r a c t
Keywords: With the computing systems becoming more and more pervasive and ubiquitous due to the invention
Security of cloud computing and mobile phone based applications, secure data transmission is the pressing need
Group communication for a real time perspective of the technologies. Examples of the need for secure key management and
Cloud computing
distribution environments include secure transmission of health related SMS, telecare medicine provi-
Mobile phone
sioning for critical applications such as heart disorders, secure agriculture monitoring, data transmission
Key management
Key distribution in surveillance scenarios, secure military networks, etc. In the context of key exchange for secure group
communication, the computational complexities need to be addressed in particular due to the advent of
resource constrained mobile phones, sensors and other embedded devices. This special issue introduces
some of the novel approaches for enabling secure group communication in the contexts related to cloud
and mobile computing.
© 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.

1. Introduction
Security is always a popular topic in computer science. Among
different branches of security, one of the widely well-known meth-
ods of middleware is Group Communication Systems (GCSs). Reli-
able and secured point-to-point and multicast messaging services
are supported in GCS and are used in mobile and cloud networks. A
lot of key agreement methods have been put forward for enhancing
securities in those networks [1–3]. In such a context, the processes
will dynamically join and leave a group during communication [2].
Therefore, the group membership is dynamic, and as group mem-
bership changes over time, notification messages are exchanged
among group members frequently [3]. The reliable and authen-
ticated communication in a dynamic group is facilitated through
generated secure keys. Such key generation primitives must be
managed and distributed appropriately for secure group commu-
nication especially in mobile and cloud networks. The process of
generating, distributing and maintaining the cryptographic keys is
taken care by key management schemes.
The rest of this editorial has been organized in the following
way. Section 2 presents the need for motivation, current oppor-
tunities and challenges to ensure Secure Group Communication
in Mobile and Cloud networks. Section 3 gives an outline of the
E-mail addresses: vijibond2000@gmail.com (P. Vijayakumar),
ic.victor.chang@gmail.com (V. Chang), blessedjeny@gmail.com
(L. Jegatha Deborah), bsr17@psu.edu (B.S. Rawal Kshatriya).
proposed approaches in the accepted papers for this special issue.
Section 4 provides necessary conclusions.
2. Motivation, opportunities and challenges for secure group
communication in mobile and cloud networks
Many of the existing technologies and business are revamping
their infrastructure to exploit the advantages of cloud computing
as it offers flexible, tailor made solutions which are crafted with
versatile domain expertise. In the present day digital world, the
perimeter of business growth towards the cloud is constrained
only by the security issues in cloud computing. Moreover, with
the advent of mobile phones and the ubiquitous nature of cloud
computing, the secure key exchange process needs to be compu-
tational efficient as power constrained battery powered devices
such as mobile phones, sensors, embedded devices and other such
instruments have become part of the secure data distribution [4,5].
In the present key exchange context, the secure key exchange
methods are not enough. Indeed, to enable the low end devices, the
algorithms responsible for secure exchange need to be computa-
tionally and storage wise efficient as well. In this connection, many
research works are being introduced in the recent days to enable
the mobile user community to be part of secure communication in
essential scenarios such as health data exchange and other critical
circumstances [6].

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.03.027
0167-739X/© 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.
124 P. Vijayakumar et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 84 (2018) 123–125
3. A brief review of the articles accepted for publication in this
special issue
This special issue proposal has sought manuscripts which focus
on developing new key distribution and key management proto-
cols for supporting multicast communication in mobile and cloud
networks. We have received 59 manuscripts from various authors.
A thorough analysis of the technical content, results and perfor-
mance evaluation, research contributions, the scope and relevance
for the benefit of the society, innovation and other factors have
been considered carefully to finalize the selection process. Finally,
with regard to this special issue, we are pleased to select ten high-
quality manuscripts from different groups of authors who focus on
advancing the latest research on the topic of secure group commu-
nication in key management and key distribution protocols. The
acceptance rate of the papers is around 16.9%. The papers which
have been accepted in the domain of this special issue include:
3.1. Secure key establishment scheme for wearable embedded devices
The authors Zitao Chen et al. [7] have proposed a novel
lightweight and real-time key establishment scheme for wearable
devices by leveraging the integrated accelerometer in LiReK: A
Lightweight and Real-time Key Establishment Scheme for Wear-
able Embedded Devices by Gestures or Motions. Specifically, a
novel way has been introduced for users to initialize a shared
key using random shakes, movements on their wearable devices.
Unlike the usual approaches to extract features from the sensing
data for key construction, this new approach can create stochastic
features in the sensing data to establish secure keys by the users’
randomly shaking their devices together. The proposed data se-
lection method can mitigate the potential for exploitation due to
regularity and correlation in the sensing data.
3.2. Prevention of Sybil attack
In the present day scenario, the online social networks are be-
coming predominant among the mobile user community. The au-
thors Muhammad Al-Qurishi et al. [8] have introduced an efficient
centralized key management protocol which prevents the Sybil
attack and provides a secure communication service among users
in online social networks. The automatically controlled accounts
are prevented from joining, and hence the group will consist only
of users who have been confirmed as genuine. The mechanism is
very effective in recognizing bot accounts, thus enabling it to guard
the network against malicious behavior by fake accounts.
3.3. Telecare medicine information systems
To remedy the problems appearing in the previous chaotic
maps-based schemes for Telecare Medical Information System
(TMIS), a new authentication mechanism for Telecare Medicine
Information Systems has been proposed by Xiong Li et al. [9].
The authors have proposed a new and secure chaotic maps-based
authentication scheme for TMISs. Through the comparison with
some recent schemes for TMISs, this scheme seems to be more
applicable to use in e-health service. The authors have used the for-
mal proof under random oracle model, and the famous verification
tool Proverif to prove the security of the proposed scheme. Apart
from this, the attacker has only a negligible probability to crack
this scheme over the active guessing attack. The formal verification
clear demonstrated that this scheme can resist the attackers. The
comparison results suggest that the proposed scheme reaches the
level of security requirements and also has suitable cost in perfor-
mance. Thus, this scheme is more applicable to telecare medicine
environments.
Yang Yang et al. [10] have proposed a cross-domain dy-
namic anonymous authenticated group key management with
symptom-matching for e-health social system. This scheme uti-
lizes a symptom-matching based GKA to establish a secure group
session key for the anonymous patients with the same symptom.
This scheme realizes anonymity, traceability for both medical in-
stitutions and patients. This scheme does not require the heavy
bilinear pairing computations in order to provide an efficient group
key management proposal and has formally been proved to be
secure. The comparison with other existing schemes demonstrates
that this scheme is more efficient, robust and secure.
3.4. Data deduplication in cloud
Yukun Zhou et al. [11] have proposed a scheme to reduce the
cloud storage space through data deduplication. The proposed ED-
edup is a similarity-aware encrypted deduplication scheme which
combines source-based similar-segment detection and target-
based duplicate-chunk checking to prevent the privacy leakage.
In addition, EDedup generates random message-derived file keys
for metadata management and also realizes access control with
revocation by adopting proxy based CP-ABE to encrypt file keys.
This scheme has been extended to support the flexible access
control with revocation and the evaluation results demonstrate
that EDedup achieves much better performance than the earlier
schemes and reduces the metadata storage overheads by 39.9%–
65.7% relative to REED.
3.5. Key-aggregate authentication cryptosystem
The authors Cheng Guo et al. [12] have proposed a key-
aggregate authentication cryptosystem to generate a constant-
size key that supports flexible delegation of decryption rights for
any set of ciphertexts. The size of the key is independent of the
number of maximum ciphertexts, meaning that the expense of this
scheme is stable no matter how frequently users upload files to the
cloud server. This scheme solves the secret-key leakage problem
by setting up an effective identity authentication. In this proposed
system, the data owner can extract an aggregated key that includes
indices of the ciphertexts, the identity of the delegate, and the
expiration date of the key. The key with the public parameters is
used by the cloud server to identify the person or entity requesting
a download, allowing the cloud server to control the right to down-
load. Remarkably, the authors have shown that the authentication
key cannot be forged, and the message in this key cannot be denied.
3.6. Secure communication in agriculture
The sensors which send critical information for agriculture
are increasingly being deployed for the agriculture improvisation.
Authors Rifaqat Ali et al. [13] have developed a secure user au-
thentication and key-agreement scheme using wireless sensor net-
works for agriculture monitoring. The protocol is validated through
Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and is also simulated using
Automated Validation Information Security Protocols and Applica-
tions (AVISPA) tool. The informal security analysis shows that the
protocol is secure and resists various kinds of malicious attacks and
hence it is applicable in real life applications.
3.7. Secure communication in VANETs
The authors SK Hafizul Islam et al. [14] have put forth a
novel, robust and an efficient password-based conditional privacy
preserving authentication and group-key agreement protocol for
VANET (Vehicular Ad-hoc Network). Though VANETs are increas-
ingly being deployed to realize the smart transportation systems
 P. Vijayakumar et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 84 (2018) 123–125
in this modern digital world, their security is still an open issue.
Hence, this scheme offers group-key generation, user leaving, user
join, and password change facilities. It is lightweight in terms
of computation and communication cost as it can be designed
without bilinear-pairing and elliptic curve. The authors present
a password-based conditional privacy preserving authentication
and group-key generation (PW-CPPA-GKA) protocol for VANETs.
Since VANETs are used to communicate with the vehicles to give
alert for weather conditions, road defects, traffic conditions, etc,
the traffic efficiency and safety of the vehicles can be improved
with the proposed approach.
3.8. Group Communication in Public Safety Networks
Xin Su et al. [15] have combined PD-NOMA and spatial mul-
tiplexing technologies to meet the demand for high spectral effi-
ciency. Due to the power-difference requirements of users in the
PD-NOMA system for the group communications, the number of
users who can share these resources is limited and the crypto-
graphic keys cannot be distributed to user equipment efficiently.
To solve this problem, the authors have investigated by combin-
ing PD-NOMA and spatial multiplexing technologies to meet the
demand for high spectral efficiency. Apart from this, that authors
suggest that throughput of the system can be further enhanced
by using PD-NOMA-SSK with multi-input multi-output (MIMO)
multiplexing technology. The simulation results prove the validity
of PD-NOMA-SSK and PD-NOMA-SSK with MIMO multiplexing
schemes by doubling and tripling the achievable spectrum effi-
ciency.
3.9. Anonymous user authentication and key distribution for mobile
multi-server environment
In this rapidly advancing technological era, the password or
smart card-based authentication schemes suffer from poor secu-
rity in multi-server environments. As a result, biometrics have
become a preferred choice for secure and robust authentication.
In such a context, the approach proposed by Qi Feng et al. [16]
enhances the anonymous user authentication and key distribution
scheme based on biometrics for mobile multi-server environment.
This scheme enables user access to services, resources and data
outsourced to the cloud without compromising the user’s privacy.
To enhance the user anonymity, the authors have proposed a new
biometrics-based authentication scheme with key distribution for
the mobile multi-server environment and it is based on smart
card and elliptic curve cryptosystem. Informal and formal security
analyses demonstrate that this scheme can satisfy the security and
functional requirements in the mobile multi-server environment.
4. Conclusion
The necessity for secure group communication in the ever
growing cloud computing and mobile based networks has moti-
vated the need for the proposal of new approaches for security
in telecare medicine information systems, agriculture, vehicular
ad-hoc networks, ubiquitous computing, online social networks,
125
etc. The prevailing motivations and challenges necessitate new
standards in security and protocols for efficient and secure group
communication utilizing the capability of cloud and mobile net-
working technologies. With the emergence of web and the busi-
nesses becoming more and more complex by progressing with
internet, the integration of security in this infrastructure is vital
for the secure application of computing in these domains. The
proposed approaches which are part of this special issue improve
the existing systems in the current scenario to achieve much better
security for efficient and safer communications.
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