Survey of security services on group communications

Secure group communication (SGC) has attracted much attention, as group-oriented communications have been increasingly facilitating many emerging applications that require packet delivery from one or more sender(s) to multiple receivers. Of all proposals reported, most have focused on addressing the issue of key management to SGC systems. The authors, however, advocate that security services are also needed to satisfy different security requirements of various applications. The authors also present here a survey on recent advances in several security requirements and security services in group communication systems (GCSs), illustrate some outstanding GCSs that deploy these security services, and describe challenges for any future research works in designing a secure GCS.