Key Graphs and Secret Sharing Be Used in Network Multicast Security
Shangzhu Jin, Jun Peng · 2009
Multicast communication is increasingly used in applications where the volume of network traffic needs to be minimized. Security of the packets delivered from a source to a large group of receivers presents one of the most challenging research problems for the network architecture. A majority of the proposals for scalable secure multicasting makes use of hierarchical key distribution trees. The centralized tree-based key management scheme assigns a unique key to each of the nodes in a member's path to the root. The group key is used by a central server to encrypt multicast data until a member joins or leaves the group.For multicast applications such as pay-per-view where the content has very high value, the group key may need to change frequently. In this paper, we introduce a new approach based on secret sharing in which the server assigns unique secret shares to the nodes in the distribution tree. Our proposal is a prepositioned shared secret scheme that allows the reconstruction of different keys by communicating different activating shares for the same prepositioned information.