A Receiver Authentication and Group Key Delivery Protocol for Secure Multicast

Abstract

We propose receiver authentication and group key delivery protocol (AKDP) to realize secure multicast communication. AKDP provides three principal functions: 1) group key delivery for data confidentiality, 2) receiver access control to cope with denial of service and 3) receiver authentication for user accounting. AKDP has a negotiation function to choose and offer only those functions required by the situation. We evaluate the feasibility of AKDP by developing a prototype system and show that total communication time is acceptable (i.e. 406 ms). We also show that the negotiation function of AKDP reduces total communication time because unnecessary functions can be skipped. We demonstrate that the negotiation function reduces the total communication time by 52% if user accounting is not executed. We also find that the scalability of group control and key server is not insignificant if multiple receivers access it simultaneously; however, we also propose a secure multicast architecture that can accommodate multiple servers and so guarantee scalability.