KTR: An efficient key management scheme for secure data access control in wireless broadcast services

Wireless broadcast is an effective approach for disseminating data to a number of users. To provide secure access to data in wireless broadcast services, symmetric-key-based encryption is used to ensure that only users who own the valid keys can decrypt the data. With regard to various subscriptions, an efficient key management for distributing and changing keys is in great demand for access control in broadcast services. In this paper, we propose an efficient key management scheme, namely, key tree reuse (KTR), to handle key distribution with regard to complex subscription options and user activities. KTR has the following advantages. First, it supports all subscription activities in wireless broadcast services. Second, in KTR, a user only needs to hold one set of keys for all subscribed programs instead of separate sets of keys for each program. Third, KTR identifies the minimum set of keys that must be changed to ensure broadcast security and minimize the rekey cost. Our simulations show that KTR can save about 45 percent of communication overhead in the broadcast channel and about 50 percent of decryption cost for each user compared with logical-key-hierarchy-based approaches.