Improved key management technique for secure multicasting over IP

Multicast communication is going to be the communication paradigm of all future networks. Secure multicasting is a very vital problem in today's networks. In secure multicasting, the group members share a common key called the group key. Whenever the group members change, the group key must be changed. Therefore, many multicast security problems are abstracted into key management and distribution problems. The problem of distributing cryptographic keys to the group members in an optimum way that minimizes the communication and storage overheads are the important objectives of a secure multicast problem. In this paper, an efficient key management technique is proposed that minimizes the number of message exchanges and the number of keys stored. Existing key management methods have O(N) and O(log N) overheads. The proposed method shows further improvement. The model has been simulated and the results show improvements to existing approaches. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.