Research of Secure Multicast Key Management Protocol Based on Fault-Tolerant Mechanism

As multicasting is increasingly used as an efficient communication mechanism for group-oriented applications in the Internet, the research of the multicast key management is becoming a hot issue. Firstly, we analyze the n-party GDH.2 multicast key management protocol and point out that it has the following flaws: lack of certification, vulnerability to man-in-the-middle attacks, and a single-point failure. In order to settle the issues mentioned above, a fault-tolerant and secure multicast key management protocol (FTS, for short) with using the fault-tolerant algorithm and the password authentication mechanism is proposed in this paper. In our protocol, legal members are able to agree on a key despite failures of other members. The protocol can also prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. Finally, we evaluate the security of FTS, and compare our protocol with the FTKM through performance analysis. The analytic results show that the protocol not only avoids the single-point failure but also improves the comprehensive performance.