A New and Efficient Key Management Scheme for Content Access Control within Tree Hierarchies

Content access control within hierarchies is an ubiquitous problem. It occurs each time that a set of users have access to a set of resources. The users do not have necessarily the same access rights. Allowing users to access only resources to which they are entitled in a scalable and efficient way is the objective of our key management scheme. In this paper, we introduce the hierarchical group communication, give an abstract model of the hierarchical group communication. We present and classify the most important works on key management for hierarchical groups from the multicast and information technology communities. Then, we propose an efficient operational solution to implement the hierarchical group communication model and proof its security and proof its security.