International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We study a method for key predistribution in a network of $n$ users where pairwise keys are computed by hashing users\' IDs along with secret information that has been (pre)distributed to the network users by a trusted entity. A communication graph $G$ can be specified to indicate which pairs of users should be able to compute keys. We determine necessary and sufficient conditions for schemes of this type to be secure. We also consider the problem of minimizing the storage requirements of such a scheme; we are interested in the total storage as well as the maximum storage required by any user. Minimizing the total storage is NP-hard, whereas minimizing the maximum storage required by a user can be computed in polynomial time.