A novel scheme for secure group communication in multicast network

Abstract

Group key management is an important framework and functional building block for any secure multicast architecture. To improve the performance and scalability of rekeying for group key management in large-scale systems, a novel scheme was proposed. In this paper, we present dynamic and large-scale groups, and the overhead of key generating and key updating is usually relevant to the group size, which becomes a performance bottleneck in achieving scalability. The overhead of key management can be shared by the sub-group controller (SGC) and group controller, and in addition, the new protocol conduces to constant computation and communication overhead during rekeying and enhances more security. Users in the systems are grouped into sub-groups based on their subscription span. The inter-group and intra-group communication is done with the help of group key and sub-group key, respectively. An analysis shows that the cost of rekeying operations is reduced and security breaches have been reduced with the proposed group key management.