Multicast Key Management Scheme

With the explosive development of Internet, a lot of new applications in Internet have occurred, many of which are multimedia applications that need quite big bandwidth, such as network video conferences, network audio/video broadcast, video on demand (VOD), real-time stock information, multimedia teleeducation and so on. That results in the sharp consuming of bandwidth and network congestion. Multicast is born in order to handle those situations. It improves the data transport rate and decreases the possibility of network congestion. This advantage makes multicast one of the most attractive network technologies.Multicast technology includes a number of aspects, such as multicast group, multicast address, multicast protocols, multicast reliability, multicast security, etc. The multicast applications are going to be widely adopted, and more and more applications need multicast provide them with secure solutions. Unfortunately the current multicast protocols can't meet those requirements. The issue of multicast security consists of data confidentiality, group management, data source authentication and so on. Multicast key management (MKM), source authentication and other security mechanisms are introduced to the multicast for security. The purpose of MKM is to solve the security problem of multicast group management. And it includes key distribution and key management according to the member changes.In this thesis, we introduce the taxonomy of MKM schemes and enumerate Group Key Management Protocol (GKMP), Centralized Tree-Based Key Management (CTKM) and Iolus, which are typical MKM schemes. Then we compare and analyze those schemes.Chapter 3 develops a new method for security analysis of the Secret Sharing system.This thesis proposes two new MKM schemes. One is Secret-Sharing-Based One-Way Function Tree (SOFT) scheme, and the other is Chinese Remainder Theorem-Based Secret Sharing (CRTSS) scheme. The details of these two schemes are discussed respectively in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. To compare and analyze MKM schemes, We take rekeying cost, computing cost, memory cost and security these four parameters as the performance criteria. With the comparison and analysis, we come to the conclusion that SOFT scheme and CRTSS scheme have the advantage on rekeying cost, and have similar capacity as or better capacity than other MKM schemes.