Title: TKS: a transition key management scheme for secure application level multicast

Authors: Hatem Bettahar, Mothanna Alkubeily, Abdelmadjid Bouabdallah

Addresses: Heudiasyc – UMR CNRS 6599, University of Technology of Compigene, BP 20529 – 60205 Compiegne cedex, France. ' Heudiasyc – UMR CNRS 6599, University of Technology of Compigene, BP 20529 – 60205 Compiegne cedex, France. ' Heudiasyc – UMR CNRS 6599, University of Technology of Compigene, BP 20529 – 60205 Compiegne cedex, France

Abstract: The Application Level Multicast (ALM) simplifies the implementation of group communication. However, it still suffer from the same management overhead in case of highly dynamic sessions. In this paper, we propose an efficient key management protocol, called Transition Key Scheme (TKS), for ALM communication. TKS aims to reduce the key management overhead in case of highly dynamic membership sessions by using a unique Traffic Encryption Key (TEK), for the group, and a small number of individual transition keys to temporally manage members who recently joined the group. Simulation results confirm that TKS reduces significantly key management overhead, compared to other existing ALM key management protocols. In addition, we validated our scheme using AVISPA validation tool, and the results show that TKS is safe against intruder attacks.

Keywords: layered multicast; streaming; security; transition key management; application level multicast; ALM; group communication; cryptography; traffic encryption key; intruder attacks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2009.028668

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2009 Vol.4 No.4, pp.210 - 222

Received: 19 Dec 2007
Accepted: 27 Jan 2009
Published online: 22 Sep 2009 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article