A Survey on Key Management for Multicast

Abstract

With the development of the Internet, Multicast applications are deployed for mainstream use, IP multicasting is critical technology in those applications. The absence of security mechanism has limited the use of multicast. In order to protect communication confidentiality, Traffic in secure multicast is encrypted with a Session Encryption Key which is only to the certificated group members. Key management become essential issue for IP multicast. The aim of key management for multicast is for group members in one multicast session to generate, refresh and transfer keys which are used for encryption and authentication. Issues about scalability, reliability and robustness are important criterias for evaluating key management scheme. In this paper, we analyze problems in key management for multicast and review some typical schemes.