TKS: a transition key management scheme for secure application level multicast

The Application Level Multicast (ALM) simplifies the implementation of group communication. However, it still suffer from the same management overhead in case of highly dynamic sessions. In this paper, we propose an efficient key management protocol, called Transition Key Scheme (TKS), for ALM communication. TKS aims to reduce the key management overhead in case of highly dynamic membership sessions by using a unique Traffic Encryption Key (TEK), for the group, and a small number of individual transition keys to temporally manage members who recently joined the group. Simulation results confirm that TKS reduces significantly key management overhead, compared to other existing ALM key management protocols. In addition, we validated our scheme using AVISPA validation tool, and the results show that TKS is safe against intruder attacks.