How to address secure multicast with a customer perspective ?

Even though multicast rekeying is one of the most visited areas in network security, solutions still are severely lacking with respect to reliability and real customer expectations. Since any rekeying operation causes the update of all members’ keying material, long-lived members are strongly affected by frequent membership changes. In this paper, we suggest a new approach that takes into account different recipient categories based on their “loyalty” and that treats each category differently by offering better service to more loyal recipients. In our first solution, we propose to restructure the Logical Key Hierarchy (LKH) scheme by separately regrouping members based on their membership duration aiming at preserving members with long duration membership from the impact of rekeying operations caused by arrivals or departures of short-lived members. We then propose an extensive method for computing system parameters like rekeying intervals based on the customer satisfaction criteria.