Efficient key management and distribution for peer-to-peer live streaming system

In secure media communication system, access control is a very important and challenging issue. A common practice is to encrypt the media content using a session key, and only legal clients know the session key to decrypt the data. Since the clients can join/leave the group session frequently, the session key needs to be updated and delivered to the legal clients accordingly in order to provide forward/backward secrecy. Existing key management and distribution schemes either fail in facing a large-scale group accessing or need to build a key distribution overlay which is different from the data transmission path so as to bring additional overhead. In this paper, we propose an efficient media-dependent and time-event-driven key management and distribution scheme, named "EKMD". Our analysis and experimental results show that the proposed scheme is a secure, scalable, reliable and efficient access control solution for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live streaming system.