Scalable Key Management Algorithms for Location-Based Services

Secure media broadcast over the Internet poses unique security challenges. One important problem for public broadcast location-based services (LBS) is to enforce access control on a large number of subscribers. In such a system, a user typically subscribes to an LBS for a time interval (a, b) and a spatial region (x(bl), y(bl), x(tr), y(tr)) according to a 3-dimensional spatial-temporal authorization model. In this paper, we argue that current approaches to access control using key management protocols are not scalable. Our proposal, STauth, minimizes the number of keys that needs to be distributed and is thus scalable to a large number of subscribers and the dimensionality of the authorization model. We also demonstrate applications of our algorithm to quantified-temporal access control (using and quantifications) and partial-order tree-based authorization models. We describe two implementations of our key management protocols on two diverse platforms: a broadcast service operating on top of a publish/subscribe infrastructure and an extension to the Google Maps API to support quality (resolution)-based access control. We analytically and experimentally show the performance and scalability benefits of our approach over traditional key management approaches.