Design and Performance Analysis of an Enhanced Group Key Generation Protocol.
Sunghyuck Hong, Noe Lopez-Benitez · 2007
Group communications have exploded in popularity in Internet applications such as videoconferences, online chatting programs, games, and gambling. Secure communications must provide integrity of messages, member authentication, and confidentiality among group members. To maintain message integrity, all group members use a Group Key (GK) for encrypting and decrypting messages while providing enough security to protect against passive attacks. The Tree-based Group Diffie-Hellman (TGDH) is an efficient key agreement protocol to generate the GK. The TGDH assumes that the key generation tree is perfectly balanced even when a group is dynamically configured by membership operations. In addition, The TGDH and other group key generation protocols assume all members have an equal computing power. One of the characteristics of distributed computing is heterogeneity; the member can be at a workstation, a laptop, or even a mobile computer. If a low performance member participates in the GK generation processes, then all members must wait until the low performance member has completed to generate the GK. Therefore, this research proposes to systematically filter out low performance members in the GK generation process to avoid unnecessary delay.