Key management scheme for multiple simultaneous secure group communication

Abstract

Secure group communication plays an important role for applications like scientific discussions, project management, teleconferencing, pay-per-view. Secure group communication involves confidential message delivery between authorized users. Applications like scientific discussion and project management may lead to a scenario in which it is necessary to set up multiple secure groups simultaneously and few members may be part of several secure groups (there may exist overlapped membership). Hence each independent group should have its own group key. Managing group keys for simultaneous secure groups is a critical issue. So far in the literature only a single group communication scenario is considered. In this paper we consider multiple simultaneous secure groups and propose a key management scheme for managing multiple groups. We use a combination of key-based and secret share-based approach for managing the keys and show that it is possible for members belonging to two or more groups to derive the group keys with less storage. We also handle membership change events and provide authentication for such multiple secure groups.