Efficient Key Distribution for Closed Meetings in the Internet

Many emerging group oriented and collaborative applications such as audio/video conferences use the peer-to-peer paradigm. Confidentiality is an often demanded feature for such applications, e.g. in business meetings, to provide group privacy. To assure confidentiality in a meeting the partners have to agree upon a common secret key for encrypting their communication. This requires efficient distributed group key exchange protocols. We present the principle of the key distribution protocol TKD which achieves a lower key refreshment delay compared to existing key exchange protocols.