A key management solution for overlay-live-streaming

Confidential communication of live-generated multimedia data distributed via application level multicast (ALM) still remains a mostly unaddressed subject even though some important usage scenarios, e.g. paid subscription services or personal video-streaming, are anticipated to gain more widespread use  as the Internet continues to evolve into the common transport platform for all kinds of services. In this article, we examine the specific requirements for key management schemes to be used in ALM-based distribution systems and analyze existing key management approaches with respect to these requirements [1], [2], [3]. Based on the results of this analysis, we design a new key management scheme that combines ideas of the Logical Key Hierarchy (LKH) protocol [4], [5] and the Iolus approach [6]. We compare the resulting scheme to a simple approach that is based on pairwise keys between neighboring nodes without further keyhierarchy based optimization and that serves as a benchmark. Our results of a comparative simulation study clearly indicate the suitability of our scheme for ALM-based live-streaming.