A reliable group key management scheme for broadcast encryption

A major challenge achieving scalable access control for a large number of subscribers in a public broadcast is to distribute key update messages reliably to all stateless receivers. However, in a public broadcast, the rekeying messages can be dropped or compromised during transmission over an insecure broadcast channel, or transmitted to receivers while they were off-line. In this study, we propose a novel group key management scheme. It features a mechanism to allow legitimate receivers to recover the current group key, even if they lose key update messages for long-term sessions. The scheme uses short hint messages and member computation. Performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme has the advantages of scalability and efficient rekeying compared to previous reliable group key distribution schemes. The proposed key management scheme targets a conditional access system in a media broadcast in which there is no feedback channel from receivers to the broadcasting station.