| Multicast has become the method of choice for group communication services such as pay-per-view television, multiparty teleconferencing, and stock quote distributions. The largest benefit of multicast being that designated subsets of the entire group membership can concurrently receive the same transmissions.; The goal of secure group communication is to transmit a message, encrypted by a common group session key, to only those users for which the message is intended. The challenge comes from the fact that the message is generally transmitted over an insecure broadcast channel that is shared by a multitude of users.; A dynamic group, that is one whose membership changes, necessitates frequent updates of the common session key. Updating the session key is also referred to as rekeying the subgroup. Rekeying is necessary so that a new member has no access to prior communication and former members are no longer authorized to receive current communication.; In this dissertation, we present four practical constructions of multicast rekeying schemes using error-correcting codes. Furthermore, the rekeying schemes require no computational assumptions. |
