Supporting subscription oriented information commerce in a push-based environment

Push-based information delivery technology is commonly expressed as a broadcast solution where the information is pushed to a channel where all receivers can tap into. In this context, prior work has explored how to broadcast and what to broadcast. However, one problem not addressed so far is providing secure access control in broadcast schemes. Furthermore, existing broadcast work does not consider a subscription-based access scheme which is conceivable for most commodities. In this paper, we present existing secure access control schemes and adapt them to the broadcasting scenario, and outline their limitations in this environment. We propose a new protocol, single encoding multiple decoding (SEMD), to handle secure access and subscription services for broadcast. The superior performance of SEMD is demonstrated via a a simulation study of existing protocols and our protocol in a mobile computing environment.