A Survey of Key Generation for Secure Multicast Communication Protocols

Abstract

Multicast communication demands scalable security solutions for group communication infrastructure. Secure multicast is one such solution that achieves the efficiency of multicast data delivery. Key generation plays an important role in enforcing secure and efficient key distribution. This chapter addresses the issues focused on the area of key generation on key management cryptographic algorithms that support security requirements in multicast group communications. These issues are of importance to application developers wishing to implement security services for their multicast applications. The three main classes, centralized, decentralized, and distributed architectures, are investigated and analyzed here and an insight given to their features and goals. The area of group key generation is then surveyed and proposed solutions are classified according to the efficiency of the cryptographic algorithms and multicast security requirements. We also outline the open problems in this area.