A Quick Group Key Distribution Scheme with “Entity Revocation”

This paper proposes a group key distribution scheme with an “entity revocation”, which renews a group key of all the entities except one (or more) specific entity (ies). In broadcast systems such as Pay-TV, Internet multicast and mobile telecommunication for a group, a manager should revoke a dishonest entity or an unauthorized terminal as soon as possible to protect the secrecy of the group communication. However, it takes a long time for the “entity revocation” on a large group, if the manager distributes a group key to each entity except the revoked one. A recently published paper proposed a group key distribution scheme in which the amount of transmission and the delay do not rely on the number of entities of the group, using a type of secret sharing technique. This paper devises a novel key distribution scheme with “entity revocation” that makes frequent key distribution a practical reality. This scheme uses a technique similar to “threshold cryptosystems” and the one-pass Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme.