A New Efficient Hierarchical Key Agreement Scheme

This paper proposes an efficient architecture to produce a hierarchical access control scheme for the multicast application environment. The architecture divides the group members into several subgroups with different access rights. In order to enhance the efficiency, the theory of Weil pairing is introduced to present a three party key agreement protocol. The advantages of this scheme are : (1) easy implementation, (2) support high dynamics group controls, including join, leave, merge and partition. Meanwhile, the communication and broadcasting between group members is merely constant rounds. Furthermore, this scheme is well-suited for high-delay wide area network.