A key management scheme for secure group communication using binomial key trees

Numerous emerging applications, such as teleconferencing, board meetings, pay-per-view and scientific discussions, rely on a secure group communication model. Scalable group rekeying is an important issue in the secure group communication model as the nature of the group is dynamic. The number of encryptions performed and rekey messages constructed should be minimized to carry out updating of the group key, and secure delivery of the group key should be carried out in an efficient manner. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to manage the secure group using the binomial key tree approach. In this scheme, the number of encryptions performed and rekey messages constructed during membership change are fewer compared to the scheme proposed by Wong and others. Further, it is not required to balance the tree after each membership change. We show that, for a large group, the average encryption cost and rekey message cost are independent of the size of the group for join operation and logarithmic in size of the group for leave operation. Hence our scheme is scalable. Copyright c 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.