Author(s)

Ayman El-Sayed

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Menouf, Egypt.

The recent growth of the World Wide Web has sparked new research into using the Internet for novel types of group communication, like multiparty videoconferencing and real-time streaming. Multicast has the potential to be very useful, but it suffers from many problems like security. To achieve secure multicast communications with the dynamic aspect of group applications due to free membership joins and leaves in addition to member's mobility, key management is one of the most critical problems. So far, a lot of multicast key management schemes have been proposed and most of them are centralized, which have the problem of "one point failure" and that the group controller is the bottleneck of the group. In order to solve these two problems, we propose a Key Management Scheme, using cluster-based End-System Multicast (ESM). The group management is between both 1) the main controller (MRP, Main Rendezvous Point) and the second controllers (CRP, Cluster RP), and 2) the second controllers (CRPs) and its members. So, ESM simplifies the implementation of group communication and is efficient ways to deliver a secure message to a group of recipients in a network as a practical alternative to overcome the difficulty of large scale deployment of traditional IP multicast. In this paper, we analyze different key management schemes and propose a new scheme, namely Advanced Transition/Cluster Key management Scheme (ATCKS) and find it has appropriate performance in security.

Multicast Protocol; End-System Multicast; Application-Level Multicast; Security; Group Key Management

A. El-Sayed, "Advanced Transition/Cluster Key Management Scheme for End-System Multicast Protocol," International Journal of Communications, Network and System Sciences, Vol. 5 No. 5, 2012, pp. 286-297. doi: 10.4236/ijcns.2012.55038.