Hybrid Key Management for Group Communications
Ahmed Abdel-Hafez, Ali Miri, Luis Orozco–Barbosa, Ahmed Abdel- Rahman · The International Conference on Electrical Engineering/The International Conference on Electrical Engineering · 2006
Due to the increased popularity of group oriented applications and protocols, securinggroup communications has become a critical networking issue and has received much attention inrecent years. A secure and efficient group key management protocol is the most fundamentalchallenge in group communication security. While key transport protocols may be appropriate forkey establishment in large networks, many collaborative applications require distributed keyagreement protocols. Proposals for key agreement protocols that have been published so far doesnot scale for large size group. In this paper we propose a novel framework for scalable keymanagement protocols in group communication, using both Key Agreement and Key transportprotocols. Our framework is based on a particular clustering of the members of the securecommunicating 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.