Key management for secure multicast communications
Radha Poovendran, John S. Baras · University Libraries (University of Maryland) · 1999
Providing key management schemes for large scale multicast groups has be-come an important problem due to many potential commercial applications such as stock quote and software distribution on the Internet. For secure multicast communication, all the group members have to share a common session key. Since the member dynamics such as join or deletion do not necessarily terminate the multicast session, it is important to update the session key to all the valid members, so that the non-members do not have access to the future keys. Find-ing efficient ways for key generation and distribution in the presence of member dynamics is an actively researched problem. This dissertation considers the single sender, multiple receiver model of secure multicast communication. The goal is to develop schemes that have reduced computational overhead at the time of key generation, minimize the amount of message units required at the time of key updates, and minimize the number of keys to be stored by the sender as well as receivers. In order to achieve this goal, a key generation and distribution architecture based on rooted trees and