Multicast Key Management without Rekeying Processes

Abstract

Secure multicast provides efficient delivery which includes an identical data from a source to multiple receivers. A common solution is to apply a symmetric key that is used to encrypt the transmitted data. However, the heavy cost of the rekeying process is the main problem in large and dynamic multicast groups. The tree-based architecture is widely used to reduce the rekeying cost in terms of storage, transmission and computation. However, it usually requires extra overhead to keep key tree balance which is in order to achieve logarithmic rekeying cost. In this paper, we shall propose a new RSA-like multicast key management scheme to solve the rekeying problem. Our protocol applies a star-based architecture to eliminate the rekeying processes and provide the good performance when the membership changes in a multicast group. Furthermore, we also provide an extended multicast scheme, in which we combine public-key and symmetric-key cryptosystems to enhance the performance of multicast encryption.