Centralized Multi-user Key Management

One of the most important challenges for securing group-oriented communications is the issue of key management. As we outlined in the introductory chapter, managing keys in a group-oriented scenario is harder than traditional key management services.

In this chapter, we explore the challenges associated with centralized key management for group-oriented applications. We will begin with an overview of the fundamental limits governing centralized multicast key distribution, and then provide a survey of several approaches that exist in the literature.We then develop a new framework for multicast key management that reduces the communication overhead associated with key management, and show how to best tune this key management scheme to reduce communication overhead.