Fine-grained, scalable, and secure key management scheme for trusted military message systems

As the military message system grows, managing large numbers of users and messages with their different security levels becomes very complex and time-consuming. This problem is magnified when it comes to providing fine-grained security services, such as assigning multiple classification levels to different parts of the same message. The number of keys to he managed also increases enormously, especially when a set of session keys is required to protect each message. Obviously, those requirements introduce the problem of scalable key management into a trusted military message system. Conventional key management schemes cannot solve this problem. In this paper we introduce a fine-grained, scalable, and secure key management system for a trusted military message system. We also implemented a prototype message system based on our ideas to show their feasibility.