A Survey of Group Key Management

Group-oriented applications are urgent in network communications for bandwidth economizations. The security issues in multicast are also urgent to be addressed. And the group key management is the foundation stone of multicast security. It has been extensively studied in recent years. In this article, we introduce the security problem in multicast-oriented communication. Then we introduce the centralized group key management protocols, and analyze the decentralization group key management. Finally, we discuss the new research directions in group key management.

1. Introduction

Although unicast communications have predominant so far, the demand for group-oriented communications is increased rapidly. Nowadays, group communication has extensive applications, such as file and software updating, news feeds, video-audio transmission, multiparty video games, military application and dividing the works and cooperation in network. So the demand for security in group-oriented communication has become urgent. In recent two decades, the topic of group-oriented security has become a focus of attention and research[1].