Efficient Group Key Distribution Mechanism for Dynamic Groups Using Public Key Broadcast Ring

Abstract

Present day advancements in the Internet technologies, especially the increase of bandwidth are definitely encouraging environment for new developments like conferencing, interactive gaming etc. Maintaining security is a critical issue in these group oriented applications. The entry and eviction of the members are the main criteria to change the group key, known as re-keying. Since re-keying is the frequently performed activity during a communication, the group key updating needs to be done in a scalable and efficient manner. This paper proposes two novel ideas: i) Group communication using public key broadcast ring and ii) Region based group communication, for efficient and scalable rekeying. These techniques show their performance in terms of no single point of failure, no need of secure channel establishment, minimum key maintenance at each member, effective bandwidth utilization and minimum computation overhead.