Efficient broadcast encryption with user profiles

Broadcast encryption (BE) deals with secure transmission of a message to a group of users such that only an authorized subset of users can decrypt the message. Some of the most effective BE schemes in the literature are the tree-based schemes of complete subtree (CS) and subset difference (SD). The key distribution trees in these schemes are traditionally constructed without considering user preferences. In fact these schemes can be made significantly more efficient when user profiles are taken into account. In this paper, we consider this problem and study how to construct the CS and SD trees more efficiently according to user profiles. We first analyze the relationship between the transmission cost and the user profile distribution and prove a number of key results in this aspect. Then we propose several optimization algorithms which can reduce the bandwidth requirement of the CS and SD schemes significantly. This reduction becomes even more significant when a number of free riders can be allowed in the system. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.