Reliably, Securely and Efficiently Distributing Electronic Content Using Multicasting

Abstract

Secure multicasting is one of the most efficient ways of delivering electronic content like streaming mutimedia to a group of users. One of the biggest challenges in secure multicasting is distributing group keys to the multicast group and managing the same. Although researchers have addressed the problem before, none of them address the fact that multicasting is an unreliable process. Thus there is no gurantee that the group key, distributed via multicasting, will be available in its correct form at the receiver. In this paper we propose a reliable and secure content distribution scheme that uses multicasting. The scheme uses an asymmetric multicast group key that is generated using parameters publicly available to all members of the group. The group key is used to encrypt a session key which is then distributed piggybacked on the multicast stream. The encrypted session key is dispersed over the stream in such a manner that receipt of a finite number of fragments of the session key ensures that the session key can be correctly recreated at the receiving end.