Group rekeying with a customer perspective

In secure multiparty communications, several solutions have been proposed to deal with group rekeying. However, most of existing solutions including the most efficient ones still are severely lacking with respect to reliability and real customer expectations. Since in these solutions, each rekeying operation requires the update of the keying material of all members alike, frequent rekeying caused by volatile members would strongly affect long-lived members. We thus 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 designed a hybrid reliability scheme based on a combination of ARQ and FEC that assures a quasi certain delivery of keying material to long-lived members. We then come up with an extensive method to determine the system parameters applicable to each member set based on the target customer satisfaction criteria.