Key management is one of the challenging issues in
group communications. It is generally used to secure
multicast data transmission as well as preventing potential
eavesdropping by malicious attackers. Group
security key should be maintained for data encryption,
while group key update and dissemination processes
are required when a new user joins or leaves
the group, which eventually lead to high communication
and computation cost. Since eavesdrop activities
can be initiated by capturing the disseminated keys,
higher communication and computation cost due to
frequent updates also increase the possibility of attack
of multicast transmission. In this paper, a key
management scheme for IPv6 networks is proposed
to reduce communication and computation cost and
therefore, fewer security risks. The obtained results
from test-bed implementation show the efficiency of
proposed scheme in terms of communication and computation
cost, number of updated paths and security
index due to key updating, while at the same time
achieving both forward and backward secrecy