MARKS: Zero Side Effect Multicast Key Management Using Arbitrarily Revealed Key Sequences

The goal of this work is to separately control individual secure sessions between unlimited pairs of multicast receivers and senders. At the same time, the solution given preserves the scalability of receiver initiated Internet multicast for the data transfer itself. Unlike other multicast key management solutions, there are absolutely no side effects on other receivers when a single receiver joins or leaves a session and no smartcards are required. The cost per receiver-session is typically just one short set-up message exchange with a key manager. Key managers can be replicated without limit because they are only loosely coupled to the senders who can remain oblivious to members being added or removed. The technique is a general solution for access to an arbitrary sub-range of a sequence of information and for its revocation, as long as the end of each sub-range can be planned at the time each access is requested.