Common Contracts

Simple and Fault-Tolerant Key Agreement for Dynamic Collaborative Groups

May 7th, 2000

• Filed
  May 7th, 2000

Secure group communication is an increasingly popular research area having received much attention in the last several years. The fundamental challenge revolves around secure and efficient group key manage- ment. While centralized methods are often appropriate for key distribution in large groups, many collabora- tive group settings require distributed key agreement techniques. This work investigates a novel approach to group key agreement by blending binary key trees with Diffie-Hellman key exchange. The resultant proto- col suite is very simple, fault-tolerant and secure. In particular, the efficiency of our protocols significantly surpasses that of prior art.