A Survey of Secure Group Key Management

Group key management is an important functional building block for any secure multicast architecture. Many grouporiented and distributed applications need security services which includes key management. Such applications need a secure group key to communicate their data. This brings importance to key distribution techniques. Secure group communication has applications in multimedia conferencing, stock quote distribution shared work space,distributed interactive simulation, grid computing, teleconferences, pay-per-view, multi party games etc., some of these applications engage in one to many communications while others involve many to many communications. Several protocols have been proposed to support secure group key management. This paper focuses on several protocols that are designed for secure group key management. Various protocols are discussed on focusing the key management.