The Cost of Adding Security Services to Group Communication Systems
Cristina Nita-Rotaru · 2000
Numerous applications requiring information delivery from one sender to many receivers are based on a group communication model. Group communication systems are used in industry and military systems where reliability and high-availability are required. With the growth of the Internet, the number of applications that can take advantage of a group communication infrastructure increased (teleconferences, white-boards, video conferences, distributed interactive simulation, collaborative work). Over wide area networks the need for providing confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of messages is essential. In this paper we present Secure Spread, a secure version of the Spread Toolkit. Secure Spread is a group communication system that utilizes contributory group key management developed by the Cliques project and Blowfish symmetric encryption algorithm. Its modular design allows drop-in replacement of encryption and/or key agreement protocol. This work will not go to the details of a c...