A Novel Key Management Scheme for Dynamic Multicast Communications

[[abstract]]Secure multicasting allows the sender to deliver an identical secret to an arbitrary set of recipients through an insecure broadcasting channel, whereas the unintended recipients cannot obtain the secret. A practical approach for securing multicast communications is to apply a session key to encrypt the transmitted data. However, the challenges of secure multicast are to manage the session keys possessed by a dynamic group of recipients and to reduce the overhead of computation and transmission when the membership is changed. In this paper, we propose a new key management scheme for dynamic multicast communication, which is based on privacy homomorphism and Chinese remainder theorem. Our scheme can efficiently and securely deliver an identical message to multiple recipients. In particular, the complexity of the key update process in our scheme is O(1)