Session-based group key agreements for secure multicast communications

The combination of a MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc Network) domain environment with multicast services introduces new challenges towards group confidentiality infrastructure. The existing technique for the rekeying operation has a critical problem in performing a key update immediately after each member change. Instead of rekeying, this paper proposes a new membership processing that occurs whenever a new multicast session starts. When the TM (Transaction Manager) begins a new multicast session, it initiates the GKA (Group Key Agreement) process. This process calculates the group key for the secure multicast session in which any group member can send secure multicast data to the rest of the multicast group. Finally, we analyze the computational load (C_load) and message transmission load (T_load) required for group key computation through our fully distributed key agreement mode.