DISEC: A Distributed Framework for Scalable Secure Many-to-Many Communication

Secure one-to-many multicasting has been a popular research area in the recent past. Secure many-to-many multicasting is becoming popular with applications such as private conferencing and distributed interactive simulation. Most of the existing secure multicasting protocols use a centralized group manager to enforce access control and for key distribution. In the presence of multiple senders it is desirable to delegate group management responsibility to all the senders. We propose a distributed group key management scheme to support secure many-to-many communication. We divide key distribution overhead evenly among the senders. Our protocol is scalable and places equal trust in all the senders.