Reliable group rekeying with a customer perspective

Even though group rekeying is one of the most visited areas in network security, solutions still are severely lacking with respect to reliability and real customer expectations. We first classify secure multicast applications with regard to these expectations and suggest a new approach that defines different recipient categories based on their "loyalty" and that treats each category differently by offering better service to more loyal recipients. We 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 then describe an extensive method for computing system parameters, like rekeying intervals, based on customer satisfaction criteria.