Multi-Service Group Key Establishment for Secure Wireless Mobile Multicast Networks

Abstract

Recently there is high demand in distributing multimedia services over the internet to ubiquitous and computational intelligent mobile subscribers by the service providers (SPs). In this instance, provision of those services must be restricted to authorized subscribers via integration of authentication and group key management (GKM). GKM with diverse group services subscribed dynamically by moving subscribers in wireless networks has been omitted in conventional approaches. However it is expected that significant key management overhead will arise in them due to multi-services co-existing in the same network. In this paper, we propose a scalable decentralized multi-service GKM scheme considering host mobility in wireless environment. In the scheme, authentication of mobile subscribers and key management phases are delegated from the trusted domain key distributor (DKD) to the subgroup controllers known as area key distributors (AKD). The trusted intermediate AKDs can then establish and distribute the service group keys to valid subscribers in a distributed manner using identity-based encryption without involving the domain key distributor (DKD). This alleviates unnecessary delays and possible bottlenecks at the DKD. We show by simulation that the proposed scheme has some unique scalability properties over known schemes in terms of optimized rekeying communication and storage overheads. The security performance studies have shown resilience to various attacks.