Efficient authenticated multi-service group key management for secure wireless mobile multicast

Recently there is high demand for ubiquitously distributing multimedia services to mobile subscribers by Internet Service providers (ISPs). These services can be restricted to authorized subscribers via integration of authentication and group key management (GKM). It is expected that significant key management overhead will rise due to diverse subscription of multi-services co-existing in the same network concurrently. In this paper, we propose a scalable decentralized multi-service GKM scheme considering host mobility in wireless environment. Both authentication and key management phases are delegated from the trusted domain key distributor (DKD) to the area key distributors (AKD). Therefore Key distribution and authentication are handled at the AKD level in a distributed fashion without involving the DKD. This alleviates unnecessary delays and possible bottlenecks at the DKD. We show by simulation that the proposed scheme shows resource economy in terms of optimized rekeying communication overheads. The security performance studies also shows resilience to various attacks.