Reliable Key Distribution for Secure Multicast by SRDP-Sign

Security is an important concern in today´s networking and particularly in satellite communication, where eavesdropping and active intrusion is much easier than in terrestrial fixed or mobile networks because of the broadcast nature of satellites. Many applications require the security feature of data confidentiality; in order to offer such capability, encryption keys must be constantly changed upon a membership change. If the keys are sent via multicast, that it is particularly useful for large groups, reliable multicast is required. In this paper we propose an efficient, reliable and multicast distribution of the encryption keys with SRDP-Sign (Satellite Reliable Distribution Protocol for Signaling). We guarantee reliability for all the receivers with a high degree of scalability. Total reliability error and the overall latency in the key distribution will be evaluated.