Analysis of Key Management Schemes for Secure Group Communication and Their Classification

Secure Group Communication is very critical for applications like board-meetings, group discussions and teleconferencing. Managing a set of secure group keys and group dynamics are the fundamental building blocks for secure group communication systems. Several group key management techniques have been proposed so far by many researchers. Some schemes are information theoretic and some are complexity theoretic in nature. Users in the secure group may negotiate with each other to derive a common group key or may compute the group key on their own. Some schemes involve a trusted Key Distribution Center (KDC), which generates and distributes initial pieces of information, whereas in other schemes users themselves select their private information. Storage at each user and communication cost among members of the group vary from scheme to scheme. Here, in this paper, we discuss some of the key management schemes proposed earlier, based on the considerations mentioned above. We also analyze the schemes with respect to storage, communication and computation costs.