Lightweight group key distribution schemes based on pre‐shared pairwise keys

In a secure communication, a one‐time session key is needed to be shared among all participants. Most well‐known key distribution schemes, such as Diffie–Hellman public‐key key distribution scheme invented in 1976 and quantum key distribution scheme invented in 1984 (also called the BB84 scheme), can only allow two users to share a key in conventional one‐to‐one communications. There are many research papers in the literature to propose group key distribution schemes for multiple participants in modern group communications. In this study, the authors propose lightweight group key distributions using pre‐shared pairwise keys. The authors first propose a three‐party group key distribution scheme. They then extend the basic three‐party scheme to establish a group key for a large size of group communications. The proposed generalised schemes can be based to any type of pairwise key distribution schemes, e.g. either quantum or non‐quantum. Moreover, both generalised multi‐party group key distribution schemes are lightweight. The main operations in the proposed schemes are key comparison between two or more than two keys (i.e. logic XOR operation) and the computation of key derivation functions.