A Scalable Approach to Secure Multicasting over IP

摘要

Multicast communication is becoming the basis for a growing number of Internet based applications. Therefore, it is very vital to provide security mechanisms for multicast communications. Many multicast security problems are abstracted into key management and distribution problems. As the group members change over time, to maintain secrecy, new keys must be generated and distributed to the remaining members in a scalable and efficient manner. A novel approach is proposed in this paper for grouping, keying and rekeying the multicast group with heterogeneous members. The proposed framework can be built on the existing IP model. A study of certain existing group key management architectures is given to understand the current scenario. Suitable protocol steps are given for the proposed key management system. The model is simulated and the results show significant improvements in performance with reduced overheads.