Adaptive secure key establishment for multicast communications in dynamic networks

Abstract

Multicast is an efficient way to deliver a message to a group of receivers and has become the basis of many applications Securing multicast communication has been a challenge and hence key establishment always had trade off between efficiency and the level of security This research work s contributions are within the scope of key establishment for secure multicast communication Secure key establishment schemes for multicast communication have been investigated intensively in past two decades All works can be newlineclassified into centralised, decentralised and key agreement schemes The centralised approaches can be classified into pairwise keys broadcast secrets and keys hierarchy Decentralised approaches can be classified into membership driven and time driven rekeying The key agreement approaches can be classified into ring based hierarchical and broadcast cooperation All of these approaches try to increase the efficiency of the key management protocol The motivations of this research work are of manifold Firstly a cryptosystem used for multicast security influences the protocol s performance A cryptosystem which is lightweight can improve the performance but most of the existing key establishment protocols try to customise the cryptosystems designed for point to point communication Secondly computation and communicational overhead can be reduced by minimising the number of rekey packets sent frequency of rekeying and newlinenumber of key translations per multicast packet The number of rekey packets sent per rekeying can be minimised by decoupling rekeying and member dynamism There is hardly any existing protocol that efficiently reduces the frequency of rekeying and also decouples rekeying and member dynamism newline newline