Group Key Management: A Taxonomy

Group-oriented services are among the emerging technologies of the last few years. The advantages of using IP multicast in group communications, such as saving bandwidth, simplicity and efficiency are typically interesting for new services combining voice, video and text over Internet. Group key management, which is an important building block in securing group communications, has received a particular attention in both academic and industry research communities. This is due to the economical relevance of group-based applications, such as video on demand, video-conferencing, collaborative work. The key management concerns the distribution and updates of the key material each time a member joins or leaves the group. The dynamic aspect of group applications due to free membership joins and leaves in addition to members’ mobility makes difficult the design of efficient and scalable key management protocols. In this paper we review existing key management protocols to secure group communication in the literature and analyze their advantages and shortcomings. We also provide our own original proposals, depicting their advantages over the existing solutions.