The present invention teaches a system and method for secure network access and group membership in a cooperative network of digital chaos transmissions. The invention involves sensing generated digital chaos sequences as spreading sequences at a transmit side and determining the availability of open channels at a receive side. Further, a broadcast “request to join” frame from a node on an open channel is transmitted to network manager or coordinator. A network manager or coordinator sends an association/authentication packet, comprised of the reserved digital chaos associated to the unique device id, in response to the “request to join” frame from a node with a valid identification.