Secure Multicast Group Key Management Scheme

Multicast is a high efficiency mechanism applied to network transport between unicast and broadcast. It affords one to many and many to many transport mode meet group applications system. It can reduce network bandwidth and alleviate the server load. Multicast has been applied widely in many ways, such as real-time data transport, multimedia conference and network game, etc. However, there also exist some issues which would block further multicast application. This is multicast security.At present, unicast security is well resolved. However, since the architecture of multicast is more complex than that of unicast, there are many problems needed to research further in multicast security. Above all of these security problems, group key management is one of the vital problems.The goal of group key management is the generation, distribution and updating of secure communication keys effectively. The emphases of this thesis are to find multicast key management methods how to generate, distribute and update keys effectively and to solve the problems of scalability, robustness and reliability.Aiming at the unscalability lies in the flat group key management, this thesis purposes a flat group key management based on secret share, which not only solves the unscalability but also batch rekeys easily.In the end, this thesis researches batch rekey and purposes the batch rekey based to queue. We analysis the performance of the batch rekey based to queue combined with the group management based on secret share. The result shows that it can not only batch rekey dynamically according to the quests but also decrease the rekey times and alleviate key server's rekey cost compared with batch rekeying based on fixed period but also is flexible.