Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2002/009

Tree-based Group Key Agreement

Yongdae Kim and Adrian Perrig and Gene Tsudik

Abstract: Secure and reliable group communication is an active area of research. Its popularity is caused by the growing importance of group-oriented and collaborative applications. The central research challenge is secure and efficient group key management. While centralized methods are often appropriate for key distribution in large multicast-style groups, many collaborative group settings require distributed key agreement techniques. This work investigates a novel group key agreement approach which blends so-called key trees with Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It yields a secure protocol suite (TGDH) that is both simple and fault-tolerant. Moreover, the efficiency of TGDH appreciably surpasses that of prior art.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Collaborative security, Diffie-Hellman protocol, dynamic peer groups, key establishment/agreement protocols

Date: received 19 Jan 2002, last revised 6 Feb 2002

Contact author: kyongdae at ics uci edu

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Note: some major revision

Version: 20051128:043023 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2002/009

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