Exploring Robusteness in Group Key Agreement

Info, ps, ps.gz, pdf. Published in Proceedings of the 21th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Phoenix, Arizona, April 16-19, 2001, pp 399-408. Nominated for Best Paper Award. ps, ps.gz, pdf. A full version of this paper was published as Johns Hopkins University, Center for Networking and Distributed Systems (CNDS) Technical report CNDS-2000-4. Citation Yair Amir, Yongdae Kim, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, John Schultz, Jonathan Stanton, Gene Tsudik, "Exploring Robustness in Group Key Agreement", Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Phoenix, Arizona, April 16-19, 2001, pp 399-408. Authors Yair Amir, Yongdae Kim, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, John Schultz, Jonathan Stanton, and Gene Tsudik Abstract Secure group communication is crucial for building distributed applications that work in dynamic environments and communicate over unsecured networks (e.g. the Internet). Key agreement is a critical part of providing security services for group communication systems. Most of the current contributory key agreement protocols are not designed to tolerate failures and membership changes during execution. In particular, nested or cascaded group membership events (such as partitions) are not accommodated. In this paper we present the first robust contributory key agreement protocols resilient to any sequence of events while preserving the group communication membership and ordering guarantees.