Group key distribution is faced with two important problems, i. e. reliability and scalability, to support security multicast for large and dynamic groups. With group member increasing, traditional reliable multicast protocol can not deal with them fully. Gossip-based group key distribution idea for wide-area dissemination was provided. It is based on an gossip-based loss recovery control mechanism. It can provide a probabilistic reliable guarantee for a information dissemination to reach every group member, which can achieve scalability and reliability. To achieve full reliability, three layers protocol model in group key distribution was provided. One is best effect layer,

which provides unreliable dissemination. Other is gossip-based loss recovery layer, which provides probabilistic reliable guarantee. Last is vsync-based layer, which provide deterministic loss recovery. We integrate probabilistic loss recovery method with deterministic one. The model possess scalability that probabilistic method has and full reliability prosthesis by vsync-based. To evaluate the effectiveness of gossip technique in scalable and reliable multicast protocols. We have compared gossip protocol with other reliable multicast protocols. Experimental result shows that gossip protocol has better scalability than other.

key management, group key distribution, gossip-based reliable multicast, reliability, scalability