Scalable key management protocol for group communication

Abstract EN

Due to the increased popularity of group oriented applications and protocols, securing group communications has become a critical networking issue and has received much attention in recent years.

A secure and efficient group key management protocol is the most fundamental challenge in group communication security.

While key transport protocols may be appropriate for key establishment in large networks, many collaborative applications require distributed key agreement protocols.

Proposals for key agreement protocols that have been published so far do not scale for large size groups.

In this paper we propose a novel framework for scalable key management protocols in group communication, using both Key Agreement and Key Transport Protocols.

Our framework is based on a particular clustering of the members of the secure communicating group into subgroups.

We describe a protocol to achieve this clustering scheme.

We describe the architecture and operation of this framework using GDH.2 as a building block.

We show that our framework is scalable to large groups with frequent membership changes.