| Abstract: | ![]()
In a secure group communication system, messages must be encrypted before being transmitted to group members to prevent unauthorized access. In many secure group communication schemes, whenever a member leaves or joins the group, group center (GC) immediately changes the common encryption key and sends the new key to all valid members for forward and backward secrecy. If valid members are not on-line, they will miss the re-keying messages and will not be able to decrypt any ciphertext. Therefore, group members must be able to store the state of the system. In some applications, like global positioning systems (GPS) or pay-per-view systems, it is not reasonable to ask group members to stay on-line all the time and save the changes to the system. A hierarchical binary tree-based key management scheme are proposed for a secure group communication. This scheme reduces the key storage requirement of GC to a constant size and the group members are not required to be on-line constantly (stateless). |
