An Efficient and Secure Multicast Key Management Scheme based on Star Topology

The today’s world relies heavily over the applications, such as e-commerce, which are using the multicast communications, carried out over the insecure channel like internet, henceforth, the need for secure group communication is realized. The secure group communication helps in transmitting data in such a way that only the members of the group are able to receive the message. In 2012, K. Saravanan and T. Purusothaman proposed a scheme for multicast key management in which the group members generated the individual private keys and henceforth, reduced the burden upon the server. However, in some cases, the forward secrecy and backward secrecy may be violated upon member’s leaving and joining the group respectively. In this paper, we proposed an improvement on the SaravananPurusothaman scheme to solve the above problem. The proposed scheme preserves the forward secrecy and backward secrecy in multicast group key management and therefore, is more secure. In addition, it also eliminates the rekeying process whenever a member joins/ leaves a group.