Scalable solutions for secure group communications

With the advent of digital technologies and widening Internet bandwidth in recent years there has been a marked rise in new multimedia services, including teleconferencing, pay-per-view TV, interactive simulations, software updates and real-time delivery of stock market information. Multicast data distribution has been used in controlled environments to deliver such services. However, the lack of secure, accountable multicast data distribution has prevented its use in general Internet environments. Proposals for multicast security solutions so far are complex and often require trust in intermediate components or are inefficient. A secure multicast protocol suite must provide data confidentiality and multicast packet source authentication. In this paper we present a robust, simple and efficient multicast key management protocol based on proxy encryption and a multicast data source authentication mechanism based on symmetric message authentication codes. The solutions are analyzed and compared to previously published schemes. The results show that the proposed schemes are efficient and scalable relative to existing schemes.