Research On Group Key Management For Application Layer Multicast

Application Layer Multicast(ALM) is a widely used and promising transport mode. It provides good solutions for the group address management and deployment issues in IP multicast. Recent researches on ALM include protocol performance, service quality and security. Among all these, ALM security is an attractive issue.The key in ALM security is group key management. A group key shared by all members can be used to meet security requirements such as confidentiality and integrity. Group key management aims to produce and distribute a shared group key to all the valid members in a scalable and robust manner. This thesis studies the group key management for ALM. The main work and creations are as the followings:1. Three ALM group key management schemes-Group Encryption, Neighbors Encryption and Hierarchical Encryption(MHKM) and their main problems are analyzed. The objective of this thesis is determined.2. A large-scale ALM oriented group key management scheme-MGKT is proposed to solve the scalability issues in Group Encryption scheme and MHKM. MGKT manages group members in clusters and confines each rekeying operation in one cluster, which reduces communication overhead efficiently without sacrificing security. In addition, MGKT achieves good robustness in key distribution with the help of assistant nodes.3. VRing oriented group key management scheme-SVR is proposed based on Chinese Remainder Theorem-Based Secret Sharing scheme(CRTSS). SVR adopts the Chinese remainder theorem and Shamir's secret sharing method in group key management which achieves good security. The feasibility of SVR is validated by simulations.