Improvement on WLAN Multicast Key Management Protocol

Multicasting is an important business in the field of the wireless local area network (WLAN). The access point (AP) usually has to seed the same message to each station (STA) of a specific group, and the multicasting is one of the most efficient communication ways. To assure the validity of the entity and the privacy of the message, we should first solve the problem of the multicast key secure distribution. In WLAN security standards, IEEE802.11i and Chinese WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI), multicast key announcement protocols are inefficient. In this paper, a new multicast key distribution protocol is proposed, and it can be used to substitute the multicast key management protocol in IEEE802.11i or WAPI. Analyses show that the proposed protocol can achieve all functional requirements of WLAN, and is more efficient than that in IEEE802.11i or WAPI.