Group key management schemes in distributed communication environment

Abstract

Distributed group communication is the most optimistic approach to provide a secure group communication in many emerging network applications such as peer to peer communication, Skype, Facebook, Whatsapp, PAY-TV, Video conferencing, Email, Twitter and online network games. Because, in distributed group communication the data are sent from any one of the group members to the remaining group members and also there is no centralized coordinator in the distributed group communication and hence it would take more computational complexity. Moreover, in distributed group communication, the users themselves generate and distribute the necessary keys to maintain the secrecy and group membership. Hence, providing security with less computation complexity is a challenging task in distributed group communication. In this paper, a detailed survey has been done towards various distributed group communication and also comparative performance analysis has been done for all the approaches. In order to do that, we have considered various parameters such as computation complexity, communication complexity and storage complexity of both the user and the server during key generation, key distribution and key updation process. Moreover, in this paper we have also included various security challenges that need to be solved to make the distributed group communication more secure. Finally, we have also given a solution to improve the various parameters in order to increase the security and performance of the distributed communication performed in various applications.