Efficient and Secure Group Key Generation Protocol for Small and Medium Business

Group communication is becoming increasingly popular in Internet applications such as videoconferences, online chatting programs, games, and gambling. For secure communications, the integrity of messages, member authentication, and confidentiality must be provided among group members. To maintain message integrity, all group members use the Group Key (GK) for encrypting and decrypting messages while providing enough security to protect against passive attacks. Tree-based Group Diffie-Hellman (TGDH) is an efficient group key agreement protocol to generate the GK. TGDH assumes all members have an equal computing power. One of the characteristics of distributed computing and grid environments is heterogeneity; the member can be at a workstation, a laptop or even a mobile computer. Member reordering in the TDGH protocol could potentially lead to an improved protocol; such reordering should capture the heterogeneity of the network as well as latency. This research investigates dynamic reordering mechanisms to consider not only the overhead involved but also the scalability of the proposed protocol.