IMS: An Identity-Based Many-to-Many Subscription Scheme With Efficient Key Management for Wireless Broadcast Systems

Abstract

Subscription-based services, where broadcasting companies make profits by providing subscription programs to users, have become a popular application of wireless broadcast systems. Driving by business interests and data security, companies usually encrypt content of programs with session keys, then only authorized users can access the contents of their subscribed programs, respectively. It is challenging to flexibly distribute and update the session key, we are therefore motivated to propose an identity-based many-to-many subscription scheme (IMS) with efficient key management. The IMS scheme possesses three novel advantages: Firstly, it provides a whole set of subscription flow, from the selection of programs of interest to the generation and updating of keys. Secondly, it supports program updating and all subscription behaviors. Thirdly, it employs a signature and authentication mechanism to stipulate that only authorized users can access the programs ciphertext. The theoretical analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme is secure against Chosen-Ciphertext Attacks (CCA) under the k-bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent (BDHE) problem, and has a decent performance in storage and computational overhead. The experimental analysis shows the total time cost of the proposed scheme is reduced more than 75.02% compared against the popular peer schemes under the condition of 2500 users.