Key Management in Secure Satellite Multicast Using Key Hypergraphs

Abstract

Satellite networks play an important role in today's information age because they can provide the global coverage services. Information security is an important concern in satellite multicast communications, where eavesdropping can be performed much easier than the fixed terrestrial networks. In this work, a novel multicast key management scheme based on key hypergraph for satellite networks on a predefined communication scenario is proposed. We use logical key hierarchy and distributed-logical key hierarchy as reference models for performance comparisons. It is shown that the proposed multicast key management scheme is scalable to large dynamic groups and minimizes satellite bandwidth usage.