M-CLIQUES: Modified CLIQUES key agreement for secure multicast

In secure multicast applications, members may join or leave frequently and key management is one of the most challenging problems. In this research, we proposed a modified CLIQUES key management protocol. It was the modification of CLIQUES that consisted of two stages: Static CLIQUES and Hierarchical CLIQUES. In Static CLIQUES, a static group controller was used to distribute the partial keys to group members. Compared with traditional CLIQUES, the Static CLIQUES was more secure for key storage, less complex, less processing requirement in the user machine, and easier to provide member privacy protection. In Hierarchical CLIQUES, a hierarchical structure was employed to support larger size of group members. Our experiments showed that the modified CLIQUES protocol was more scalable than CLIQUES. Also, it required less processing power than the Key Tree-Based approaches.