| This thesis focuses on the designs of a secure protocol for the IP multicast and its applications to secure multimedia multicast services.; The basic concept of IP multicast is well documented. Previous research in the secure multicast protocols and group key management solutions is reviewed. A scalable and efficient protocol for the secure one-to-many multicast is proposed. The proposed protocol achieves scalability, membership forward and backward secrecy and high efficiency. The protocol does not need to trust the subgroup controllers and the key distributors; therefore, the trusting third-parties problem is solved. To efficiently handle unreliable network service and reduce time overhead of the member join operation, our approach uses a one-way hash function to compute the new subgroup keys locally to eliminate the secret key transmissions and encryption/decryption computations. This advantage makes the dynamic subgrouping scheme practical in the proposed protocol. We also present a fast encryption algorithm for multimedia data and a digital rights management scheme to support the proposed protocol.; The proposed multicast protocol in this thesis has great uses in the applications of secure audio and video multicast services, e.g. Internet Radio and TV pay-per-view, online video-on-demand, etc. |
