• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.418-428
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• 2012

With the requirement for providing multiple levels of access control for group members, many group key management schemes designed for hierarchical access control have been put forward. However, most of these schemes focus on the efficiency of group key establishment and rekeying in centralized environments. This paper proposes an integrated group key agreement (IGK) scheme for contributory environments. The IGK scheme employs the integrated key graph to remove key redundancies existing in single key trees, and reduces key establishment and rekeying time while providing hierarchical access control. Performance analyses and simulations conducted with respect to computation and communication overheads indicate that our proposed IGK scheme is more efficient than the independent group key agreement scheme.