Design And Analyze Of A Secure Application Layer Multicast Key Management

Multicast is an efficient way to exchange data to achieve low network transmission overheads and high scalability. There are a number of network applications that make good use of multicast capability, such as distribution of digital media, quote services, video-conferencing, Internet Broadcasting, Pay-TV, and so on. As the security threats increase over the Internet, many multicast applications need to secure the communications between the group members and only allow the legitimate subscribers to access the specified multicast group. The commonly used technique to secure the multicast communications is to use a key that is known to all group members, but is unknown other non-members. This brings about the scheme of group key management.Application Layer Multicast (ALM) has been proposed to overcome current limitations in IP multicast. After summarizing security issues of ALM, one securer ALM key management scheme named SOKS (Secure Overlay Key Scheme) based on the improved Host-to-Host Encryption and Whole Group Encryption technologies is proposed here in the thesis. The primary thoughts are as follows:1. Summarize the design rules of current group key management and group key management system architectures briefly.2. Describe the group key management solutions proposed so far, distributing them into the classes of centralized group key management protocols decentralized architectures and distributed key management protocols. After that analyze them comparatively within their respective class and give an insight of their features.3. Focus the unsatisfactory performance of existing schemes in the Rekeying, propose a secure ALM key management scheme named SOKS (Secure Overlay Key Scheme) based on the improved Host-to-Host Encryption and Whole Group Encryption technologies. In comparison with the previous schemes, discover its less rekeying messages and lower nodal processing overhead.4. The related analysis shows that there is an optimal cluster size, and the corresponding key management scheme is efficient in the computation cost, storage cost and feasibility. Lastly, the correlative conclusions are tested and proved via simulation experiment. The simulation result shows that this key management protocol can improve the system security without lost network performance.