Development of decentralized key management frameworks for secure group communication

Abstract

The rapid increase in the internet oriented group based applications like healthcare military home online collaborative chat video conferencing etc increases the popularity and attention of the secure group communication over resource constraint network Multicasting is a promising communication model for the group oriented communication because the bandwidth requirement of the multicast is lesser than all other types of communication models Unfortunately the strengths of multicasting are also its security weaknesses The security level of multicast is low and it is more vulnerable to many threats Most of the existing methods practice with strong cryptographic function that uses more encryption decryption cycles to improve the security which leads to performance degradation Hence a demand to improve the security features for multicast group communication is constantly increased The functional areas such as data handling key management and security policy are equally important to accomplish the security requirements of group communication But the dynamic nature creates more complication in ensuring the security requirements Many researchers have worked in this regard and proposed that the key management frameworks handle the dynamic membership policy efficiently. Many researchers have proposed different key management frameworks for handling dynamic membership changes in the secure multicast communication such as GKMP GKMP A GKM and Iolus From their suggestions it is concluded that Group Key Management is more suitable and efficient framework for handling dynamic membership changes to fulfill the requirements of the group communication security without affecting the performance Group Key Management is a primary security service for a multicast oriented group communication in both wired and wireless networks newline