A time-efficient contributory key agreement scheme for secure group communications

Group-oriented services are attractive to both customers and service providers since they allow for potential markets that exploit user collaboration and shared experiences. In order to protect the content of a group service, the content must be encrypted using a key shared by group members. With the advancement of network technologies, customers will access group services from different networks using different terminals. The computational capabilities of the group members will vary. Contributory key agreement schemes have been developed to support secure communication between many senders and many receivers, but do not consider that users might require different amounts of time to perform a round of key establishment. In this paper, we develop a contributory key agreement scheme to setup the customer group which achieves a smaller latency for group key generation than existing schemes. We then address the latency needed to rekey the group during member joins and departures. A protocol that determines the location to place a joining member is presented that considers the time needed for rekeying the joining member as well as the effect the joining member has upon the departure times of the other group members. Simulations are presented that compare our algorithms with existing schemes for different group sizes, as well as different user join rates.