Abstract

Most of the existing key management protocols adopt a centralized architecture, which depends on a single server to distribute keys and update them. In this paper, Leveraging the blockchains that allow us to have a distributed peer-to-peer network where non-trusting entities can interact with each other without the need to a trusted intermediary, in a verifiable manner, we developed an efficient distributed multicast key management scheme. In the proposed scheme, group members can manage the group communication in a contributory way. Furthermore, we apply our proposed approach to new critical infrastructure paradigm such as smart grid microgrids, which can be considered as a small-scale system where no fixed trusted third party to control the key management process. The security and performance analysis of our proposed approach demonstrates its effectiveness and scalability by taking into account the computation and communication costs which are main concerns in the big data era.