Key management and multicast security: A survey

Multicast routing is an efficient communication mechanism for group-oriented applications. Several such applications need security guarantees : authentication, integrity confidentiality and access control. Techniques implementing these security services for point-to-point communications can not be directly used in a group communication settings. Consequently, group communication security has been extensively studied. Much current research has been dedicated to key management, which is a building block for all security mechanisms. In this paper, we describe the different existing approaches for managing keys within a group. We discuss the advantages and drawbacks of key management protocols existing in the literature and present a classification and a comparative study of these protocols. We also provide some criticisms and future directions.