An Efficient and Secure Group Key Distribution Protocol for IP-based Pay-TV Systems

Abstract

Recently,IP-based broadcasting systems,such as Mobile-TV and IP-TV, have been widely deployed. These systems require a security system to allow only authorized subscribers access to broadcasting services. We analyzed the Conditional Access System, which is a security system used in the IP-based Pay-TV systems. A weakness of the system is that it does not scale well when the system experiences frequent membership changes. In this paper, we propose a group key distribution protocol which overcomes the scalability problem by reducing communication and computation overheads without loss of security strength. Our experimental results show that computation delay of the proposed protocol is smaller than one of the Conditional Access System. This is attributed to the fact that the proposed protocol replaces expensive encryption and decryption with relatively inexpensive arithmetic operations. In addition, the proposed protocol can help to set up a secure channel between a server and a client with the minimum additional overhead.