INTERNET DRAFT July

This document provides a framework for group key management for multicast security, motivated by three main considerations, namely the multicast application, scalability and trust-relationships among entities. It introduces two planes corresponding to the network entities and functions important to multicasting and to security. The key management plane consists of two hierarchy-levels in the form of a single ’trunk region’ (inter-region) and one or more ’leaf regions’ (intra-region). These regions are defined to have unique group keys and are open to differing (inter-region or intra-region) group key management protocols. The advantages of the framework among others are that it is scalable, it has reduced complexity and allows the independence in regions of group key management. Hardjono, Cain, Doraswamy [Page 1] INTERNET DRAFT July 1998