On securely scheduling a meeting

Abstract

When people want to schedule a meeting, their agendas must be compared to find a time suitable for all participants. At the same time, people want to keep their agendas private. This paper presents several approaches which intend to solve this contradiction. A custom-made protocol for secure meeting scheduling and a protocol based on secure distributed computing are discussed. The security properties and complexity of these protocols are compared. A trade-off between trust and bandwidth requirements is shown to be possible by implementing the protocols using mobile agents. © 2002 Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, New York.