Self-Similar key generation for secure communication in multimedia applications

Abstract

Long term research activities focus on the provision of fundamental understanding and easy deployment of multimedia services on the multimedia communication. The rapid growth of digital communication and electronic data exchange provides the intensive data transfer without concentrating on the security issues. Secure communication with the minimal computational and storage overhead is the challenging task with the large size members nowadays. The Group Key Management (GKM) protocols offer numerous solutions to the security issues with an efficient interaction of group members controlling them. The groups participated in secure communication belongs to open or close scenario. The participation of registered members in close group is beneficial than the open group. With the increase in number of participants, the key size and the number of key generations will increase the computational overhead. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes the novel self-similar key generation and distribution scheme on the basis of the Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH) and Chinese Reminder Theorem (CRT). The assigning permission to each node to generate their own key at the specified time by the ECDH prevents the unnecessary distribution of keys that reduces the communication overhead. Then, the application of CRT theorem reduces the mathematical burden of key generation. Finally, the integration of the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with the above mechanisms validates the number of messages transferred among the participants in both sender and receiver side. The prior key generation using ECDH and the CRT-based self-similar key generation reduces the computational and communication overhead effectively. The comparative analysis between the proposed SSKG with the existing schemes in terms of overhead, complexity assures the effectiveness of proposed schemes in secure multicast communication.