DM-GKM: A key management scheme for dynamic group based applications

Abstract

In recent years, group-based applications (GBAs) have gained popularity due to their interesting and promising functionalities such as video on demand, teleconferencing, and pay per view. The advancements in wireless networks and the emergence of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have also increased the demands for GBAs.However, the implementation of group key management protocols for GBAs leads to significant computational, storage and communication overheads as well as potential system bottlenecks due to the high mobility of group members. The goal of this research is to address these issues and design a lightweight key management framework that requires fewer computations of keys for dynamic mobile users. A new group key management framework is proposed in this research, which is called the “DynaMic Group Key Management” (DM-GKM) framework. This framework exploits the advantages of the asymmetric key cryptosystem in order to guarantee security and it alleviates the rekeying overhead and distributing the independent Group Key (GK) for each cluster. Simulation and performance analysis demonstrates that the DM-GKM framework fulfils the requirements of a lightweight key management framework for large, dynamic groups of users. An analytical model is also developed to determine the performance and security features of the proposed framework.