Key Management for Secure Multicast Communication: A Survey

Multicast IP communication is increasingly used as an efficient large-scale communication mechanism for one-to-many and many-to-many communication applications on the Internet. Success of such communication mode has required the development and integration of security mechanisms. The main problem in securing a multicast session is the key management group. Membership in a multicast group is dynamic, allowing hosts to enter and leave the multicast session without the permission or knowledge of other hosts making it susceptible to attack unless they are secured. This paper addresses issues relevant to implementing security for IP multicast networks including issues of group membership and key distribution, and principally, several keying architectures are evaluated and compared to determine their strengths and weaknesses.