Key Distribution Protocol for Secure Multicast with Reduced Communication Delay

Abstract

Providing effective security with minimum communication cost in the distribution of keying material in a secure multicast communication is a challenging issue, since the amount of information sent through the wired or wireless channel is high. Moreover, the key must be sent securely to the group members. In this paper, we propose a new Key Distribution Protocol that reduces the time delay taken to distribute the keying information to receiver side. To minimize the amount of bits communicated we propose secure one way hash function in the key distribution protocol in which Euler’s Totient Function ϕ(n) is used in the key computation process. It decrease the time delay to reach the destination by reducing the number of bits communicated while distributing the Keying and re-keying information. Two major operations in this scheme are joining and leaving operations for managing multicast group memberships. The main advantage of this approach is that it uses an existing binary tree based key management scheme to manage the keys that are generated by the GC. The performance of this approach is compared with the existing approaches in this paper and it is shown that this proposed approach takes less communication delay.