An efficient LKH tree balancing algorithm for group key management

Abstract

The efficiency and security of secure group communication are dependent on the group key manager (GKM), which manages the group keys and membership. Although a GKM can employ any kind of group key management algorithm, we adopt the logical key hierarchy (LKH) for its efficiency and scalability. LKH is a tree-based group key management algorithm, which is more efficient when the key tree is balanced. However, only a few papers or documents have dealt with practical tree balancing techniques so far. In this letter, we propose LKH tree manager, an LKH key tree balancing algorithm that is efficient for a large and highly dynamic secure group.