Key Management for Multicast: Issues and Architectures
D. Wallner, Eric J. Harder, R. Agee · 1999
This report contains a discussion of the difficult problem of key management for multicast communication sessions.It focuses on two main areas of concern with respect to key management, which are, initializing the multicast group with a common net key and rekeying the multicast group.A rekey may be necessary upon the compromise of a user or for other reasons (e.g., periodic rekey).In particular, this report identifies a technique which allows for secure compromise recovery, while also being robust against collusion of excluded users.This is one important feature of multicast key management which has not been addressed in detail by most other multicast key management proposals [1,2,4].The benefits of this proposed technique are that it minimizes the number of transmissions required to rekey the multicast group and it imposes minimal storage requirements on the multicast group.1.0 MOTIVATION It is recognized that future networks will have requirements that will strain the capabilities of current key management architectures.One of these requirements will be the secure multicast requirement.The need for high bandwidth, very dynamic secure multicast communications is increasingly evident in a wide variety of commercial, government, and Internet communities.Specifically, the secure multicast requirement is the necessity for multiple users who share the same security attributes and communication requirements to securely communicate with every other member of the multicast group using a common multicast group net key.The largest benefit of the Wallner, et al. Informational [Page 1]