Distributed Group Key Management with Cluster based Communication for Dynamic Peer Groups

Abstract

Secure group communication is an increasingly popular research area having received much attention in recent years. Group key management is a fundamental building block for secure group communication systems. This paper introduces a new family of protocols addressing cluster based communication, and distributed group key agreement for secure group communication in dynamic peer groups. In this scheme, group members can be divided into sub groups called clusters. We propose three cluster based communication protocols with tree-based group key management. The protocols (1) provides the communication within the cluster by generating common group key within the cluster, (2) provides communication between the clusters by generating common group key between the clusters and (3) provides the communication among all clusters by generating common group key among the all clusters. In our approach group key will be updated for each session or when a user joins or leaves the cluster. More over we use Certificate Authority which guarantees key authentication, and protects our protocol from all types of attacks.