A distributed key assignment protocol for secure multicast based on proxy cryptography

A secure multicast framework should only allow authorized members of a group to decrypt received messages; usually one "group key" is shared by all approved members. However, this raises the problem of "one affects all," whereby the actions of one member affect the whole group. Many researchers solve the problem by dividing a group into several subgroups, but most existing solutions require a centralized trusted controller to coordinate cryptographic keys for subgroups. We believe this is a constraint on network scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to solve key management problems in multicast networks. Our contribution is three-fold: 1) We exploit the ElGamal cryptosystem and propose the idea of key composition; 2) A distributed key assignment protocol is proposed to eliminate the need for a centralized trust controller in a secure multicast network that leverages proxy cryptography; and 3) We adopt a hybrid encryption technique that makes our framework more efficient and practical. Comparison with similar frameworks shows the proposed scheme is efficient in both time and space complexity. In addition, costs of most protocol operations are bounded by constants regardless of a group's size and the degree of transit nodes.