A Mixed Key Assignment Algorithm for Secure Multicast

Key assignment algorithm plays a very important role in the large and dynamic groups for group key management. This paper investigates detailed and deeply key assignment algorithms and analyses breadth first assignment (BFA) and depth first assignment (DFA). Combining the advantage and disadvantage of these two kinds of algorithms, we present a new mixed key assignment algorithm (MKA). Our results show that this approach is much better than previous key assignment algorithms for reducing the average number of packets that a user needs to receive and the variance of it.