Efficient, secure multicasting with minimal knowledge

摘要

A system for secure multicast including a plurality of participants (103) that can send and receive multicast messages is disclosed. A traffic distribution component (102) is coupled to the participating entities, where the traffic distribution component supports multiple receiver communication. A participant key management component (109) operates within each participant entity (101) where the participant key management component uses a first key (110) that is shared with all the other participants, and a second key (107) that is shared with a sub group of the participants. A group key management component (108) is implemented using a flat data structure having a size that is logarithmically proportional to the number of participants. <IMAGE>