Efficient key management for secure group communications with bursty behavior

Secure group communication (SGC) is becoming more popular in the Internet. Burstiness is an important behavior in SGC. Performing bursty operation in one aggregate operation is important for efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we extend the well-known key-tree key management protocol for SGC to situations with bursty user arrival and departure patterns. By using a binary representation technique for indexing the keys and the members on the key tree, we propose an efficient algorithm for bursty operation. The algorithm uses only binary right shift operation, which is extremely simple and efficient and could be embedded in standard secure multicast API packages. We also present experimental results from our algorithm.