Full-healing group-key distribution in online social networks

A new type of group key distribution (GKD), called 'full-healing' group key distribution (F-GKD), is proposed in this paper which helps new-added members to recover the historical session keys. On the basis of the F-GKD scheme, a security approach is proposed for the privacy preservation of online social networks (OSNs). Compared with conventional public-key approaches, our approach has the following advantages: (1) only the polynomial interpolation computation is executed in our approach, which is much lighter than modulo exponentiation or pairing operations, (2) 1-to-many key distribution is more efficient and scalable than 1-to-1 style in public-key approaches, (3) full-healing property speeds up the historical session recovery (HSR), which has the de facto practicability in OSN services. Experiment is also implemented to evaluate the performance of our approach.