Ancestors protocol for scalable key management

Abstract

Group key management is an important functional building block for secure multicast architecture. Thereby, it has been extensively studied in the literature. The main proposed protocol is Adaptive Clustering for Scalable Group Key Management (ASGK). According to ASGK protocol, the multicast group is divided into clusters, where each cluster consists of areas of members. Each cluster uses its own Traffic Encryption Key ( TEK). These clusters are updated periodically depending on the dynamism of the members during the secure session. The modified protocol has been proposed based on ASGK with some modifications to balance the number of affected members and the encryption/decryption overhead with any number of the areas when a member joins or leaves the group. This modified protocol is called Ancestors protocol. According to Ancestors protocol, every area receives the dynamism of the members from its parents. The main objective of the modified protocol is to reduce the number of affected members during the leaving and joining members, then 1 affects n overhead would be reduced. A comparative study has been done between ASGK protocol and the modified protocol. According to the comparative results, it found that the modified protocol is always outperforming the ASGK protocol.