Key exchange protocol for satellite multicast systems using Elliptic Curve Cryptography primitives

Satellite multicast systems play a vital role in everyday living ranging from military application, environment monitoring, healthcare administration, Television/Entertainment broadcasting, to broadband digital communications. With the increasing dependence on satellite multicast systems, security has also become increasingly crucial. Security has been a challenging problem since the emergence of communication, and satellite multicast systems have not been exempted from this problem. The security problem in satellite systems emerges from the very high number of members accompanied with a very high frequency of member join-leave events. For a secure satellite multicast system, data is encrypted at the source (satellites) and is broadcasted wirelessly till it gets to the final destination (members of the terrestrial unit). We are primarily concerned with the key exchange protocol used for digitally signing members of these multicast systems. We propose a protocol that finds a trade-off between various cryptographic digital signature schemes. The implementation would involve using Logical Key Hierarchy (LKH) protocol as this reduces the effect of member join-leave events by rekeying a single section of the logical tree as opposed to the whole tree. We have utilized primitives of the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) which is a very well-known public cryptography scheme. The design of our protocol was achieved using Network Simulator 2(NS2).We have also shown the analysis of the results using the Network Simulator Graph Analyzer 2.0.