DeGKM: Decentralized Group Key Management for Content Push in Integrated Networks

Group-based content push can be widely applied in integrated networks, where group key management is crucial for the push's security. Existing group key management methods mainly include symmetric group key agreement, broadcast encryption, asymmetric group key agreement, and attribute-based encryption. However, most of them do not consider user equipment (UE) identity privacy and unlinkability, cannot support flexibility and efficiency due to each UE maintaining group keys, and lack the trustworthiness of UE and group key management, which hinders the widespread adoption of group-based content push in trustless environments like integrated networks. In this paper, we investigate a novel decentralized group key management (DeGKM) scheme for group-based content push in integrated networks, where different operators manage pseudonyms and group keys across domains in a decentralized manner. In particular, our scheme adopts verifiable shuffling to establish a unified and trustworthy inter-domain pseudonym management approach that can preserve UE identity privacy and pseudonym unlinkability without relying on a trusted third party, and introduces a unified inter-domain group key management method based on Chinese remainder theorem and blockchain that significantly guarantees the flexibility, efficiency and trustworthiness. We formally prove the security of DeGKM and show its efficiency through simulations and comparisons with related works.