Move Internet Key Management For Secure Multicast Communications

The proliferation of the Internet computing and mobile computing gives rise to the growth of mobile Internet applications. An important issue in secure group communications is key management, for distributing and updating the group key shared by a group of mobile users. The challenges lie in dynamic updates of the key caused by frequent movements, joins and leaves of group members and the large size of a group.This paper presents many kinds of schemes on secure multicast key management. A novel multicast communication model named "RingNet" hierarchy is proposed. A novel hierarchical secure access control scheme on key management is proposed based on this model. Since network entities of the higher-privileged local groups have the right to derive the keys held by network entities of the lower-privileged ones, and the re-key messages across the boundaries of local groups can be significantly reduced. It's concluded that the number of encryptions and re-key messages are less than the other protocols.However, the access control scheme relies on the "Certificate Authority"; consequently a dual-key management protocol is proposed to improve it. Since key servers of the mobile hosts rely on the PKJ to communicate with upper entities, the re-key overhead is limited within the subgroups and the overall overhead is reduced. The simulation results show that the dual-key management protocol has better performance than "inter-domain group key management". The real re-key messages and the re-key events are reduced to approximately 30% and 65% respectively. Therefore, the overhead is reduced significantly for better scalability.Most of the existing key management protocols are specific to the wired networks, which do not consider the features of the mobile Internet such as host mobility. The proposed key management protocol in this paper explicitly considers the characteristics of mobile Internet, which can be used for a reference to the related works.