Multiple Permissions Multicast Communication, One-way Function Based Group Key Management Protocol

With the rapid development of the Internet and the increase of network bandwidth, multicast communications techniques in the Internet have become more and more mature. Many applications are based on multi-privileged group communications using multiple data streams. Multi-privileged group communications are different from the traditional group communications. Multi-privileged group communications contain multiple data streams, and group users have multiple access privileges because of subscribing different data streams. Security is relatively easy to be guaranteed in traditional group where all the group members have the same privilege, while it is very difficult to handle in multi-privileged group communications.This paper presents many kinds of group key management protocol in multi-privileged group communications, and proposes an efficient group key management protocol in multi-privileged group communications. The proposed protocol assigns a unique ID to each node on key graph. With the special relationship among the nodes' IDs, group users can deduce the new keys using one-way function by themselves according to the ID of joining/leaving/changing node on the key graph, and thus the proposed protocol can greatly reduce the rekeying overhead.This paper compares the proposed protocol and the existing MGKMS protocol by theoretical analysis and simulation experiments. The theoretical analysis shows that, although the users in the proposed protocol requires a little more storage overhead, it can reduce the demand for the network bandwidth and the calculation cost of server and user. In addition, the simulation results show that, compared with the MGKMS protocol, the proposed protocol can reduce the rekeying overhead by 70% in best case. Also, the results prove that the new protocol has stronger stability and better scalability.Most of the existing key management protocols are specific to the group communications in whicn users have the same privilege. However, many applications support multi-privileged group communications. The proposed protocol in this paper are specific to multi-privileged group communications, which can be used for a reference to the related works.