An Efficient and Flexible Decentralized Multicast Key Distribution Scheme

[[abstract]]Multicast communication is becoming the basis for a growing number of Internet-based applications. The secure distribution of services or messages by the server to all multicasting group members requires an efficient and scalable way for distributing a group key to eligible members. Most of the existing research are focusing on group key and group members management, and can be divided into four types: centralized, decentralized, distributed, and hybrid schemes. In this paper, we propose an efficient and flexible decentralized multicast key distribution scheme with less computational cost and more functionality. The merits include: (1) the scheme needs no shared keys table between the registration center and all members; (2) a group key is distributed by servers to eligible members; (3) the computation cost is very low; (4) members and servers can authenticate each other; (5) our scheme is nonce-based and dose not have a serious time-synchronization problem; (6) also, the shared secret key distribution between dynamic participants is addressed in our proposed scheme