New key management approach for broadcast and multicast services

Key management for multicast and broadcast services has been the subject of extensive research for more than 10 years. Difficulty to find an appropriate security mechanism lies in the fact that a very high number of users consume streamed protected contents simultaneously. 3GPP, IEEE and ETSI security experts have developed various Key Management Schemes (KMS) that focus on the reduction of transmission overhead caused by distribution of associated key material over broadcast and interaction channels. In this paper, we propose new approach to key management, called 2-way Hash Chains Scheme (2HCS), which effectively reduces the number and the size of keying messages and shows considerable performance improvement over its predecessors.