Analysis of Adaptive Group Key Management Protocol Using Network Simulator 2

IP Multicast is increasingly used as an efficient communication mechanism for group oriented applications. This success urged the development of security mechanisms for that communication model. In dynamic multicast groups, new members may join or current members may leave the group dynamically. Due to dynamic nature of these multicast groups, the group key is needed to be changed dynamically to maintain group key confidentiality. Existing group key management protocols do not take into consideration the dynamicity of group members. In this paper we first classify proposed protocols for secure multicast and discuss their non suitability for dynamic group. This leads to inefficient solutions for real multicast session. We then propose an efficient protocol, called AKMP, which maintain good performance by adapting the key management process with the membership frequency during the multicast session. A simulation result shows that AKMP is more efficient than existing protocols.