RFC 2627 (rfc2627) - Page 1 of 23
Key Management for Multicast: Issues and Architectures
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group D. Wallner
Request for Comments: 2627 E. Harder
Category: Informational R. Agee
National Security Agency
June 1999
Key Management for Multicast: Issues and Architectures
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This report contains a discussion of the difficult problem of key
management for multicast communication sessions. It focuses on two
main areas of concern with respect to key management, which are,
initializing the multicast group with a common net key and rekeying
the multicast group. A rekey may be necessary upon the compromise of
a user or for other reasons (e.g., periodic rekey). In particular,
this report identifies a technique which allows for secure compromise
recovery, while also being robust against collusion of excluded
users. This is one important feature of multicast key management
which has not been addressed in detail by most other multicast key
management proposals [1,2,4]. The benefits of this proposed
technique are that it minimizes the number of transmissions required
to rekey the multicast group and it imposes minimal storage
requirements on the multicast group.
1.0 MOTIVATION
It is recognized that future networks will have requirements that
will strain the capabilities of current key management architectures.
One of these requirements will be the secure multicast requirement.
The need for high bandwidth, very dynamic secure multicast
communications is increasingly evident in a wide variety of
commercial, government, and Internet communities. Specifically, the
secure multicast requirement is the necessity for multiple users who
share the same security attributes and communication requirements to
securely communicate with every other member of the multicast group
using a common multicast group net key. The largest benefit of the
Wallner, et al. Informational