Key management in efficient and secure group communication

Abstract

Wireless communication growth inspires so many new network applications, which are based on multicast communication and group communication models. In a multicast communication to secure our communication from the attackers and unauthenticated users some security policies need to deploy in our network. There are various methods of deploying security one of them is cryptography. It applies a keying process at sender and receiver ends. So, the work of Key management is to manage cryptographic keys in a system. The main functions are key generation, key exchange, storage, use, and replacement of keys. It also works for cryptographic protocol design. It focuses keys which are being used at the user level and at the sender level of data either between users or systems. It is very difficult task of cryptography because it involves system policy, user training, and coordination between all of the components. Key management in multicast communication is more complex than Unicast communication. In a secure system, assuming that a request is made to establish a multicast session amongst a group of members which are communicating to each other is granted. So, this keying process suffers with few problems like more overheads, key size, nos. of keys used etc. This paper focuses on these issues and a new method is proposed here to reduce the communication overheads as well as storage overheads.