Computationally effecient group re-keying for time sensitive applications

Key distribution is an important problem for secure group communications. Multicast is an efficient means of distributing data in terms of resources usage. All the designated receivers or members in a multicast group share a session key. Session keys shall change dynamically to ensure both forward secrecy and backward secrecy of multicast sessions. The communication and storage complexity of multicast key distribution problem has been studied extensively. We implement a new multicast key distribution scheme whose computation complexity is significantly reduced. Instead of using conventional encryption algorithms, the scheme employs MDS codes, a class of error control codes, to distribute multicast key dynamically. This scheme drastically reduces the computation load of each group member compared to existing schemes employing traditional encryption algorithms. Easily combined with any key-tree-based schemes, this scheme provides much lower computation complexity while maintaining low and balanced communication complexity and storage complexity for secure dynamic multicast key distribution. Keywords-distribution, multicast, MDS codes, computation complexity, erasure decoding .