The VersaKey Framework: Versatile Group Key Management
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Author / Producer
Date
1998-09
Publication Type
Report
ETH Bibliography
yes
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Abstract
Middleware supporting secure applications in a distributed environment faces several challenges. Scalable security in the context of multicasting or broadcasting is especially hard when privacy and authenticity is to be assured to highly dynamic groups where the application allows participants to join and leave at any time. Unicast security is well-known and has widely advanced into production state. But proposals for multicast security solutions that have been published so far are complex, often require trust in network components or are inefficient. In this paper, we propose a framework of new approaches for achieving scalable security in IP multicasting. Our solutions assure that that newly joining members are not able to understand past group traffic, and that leaving members may not follow future communications. For versatility, our framework supports a range of closely related schemes for key management, ranging from tightly centralized to fully distributed and even allows switching between these schemes on-the-fly with low overhead. Operations have low complexity (O(log N) for joins or leaves) grants scalability even for very large groups. We also present a novel concurrency-enabling scheme, which was devised for completely distributed key management. In this paper we discuss the requirements for secure multicasting, present our flexible system, and evaluate its properties, based on the existing prototype implementation.
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Publication status
published
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Journal / series
Volume
57
Pages / Article No.
Publisher
ETH Zurich, Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory
Event
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
Secure multicasting middleware; Tree-based key distribution; Multicast key distribution schemes; Distributed key management; Current key distribution
Organisational unit
02640 - Inst. f. Technische Informatik und Komm. / Computer Eng. and Networks Lab.