Secure Anonymous Group Infrastructure for Common and Future Internet Applications

Secure group communication protocols, in particular multi-party key agreement and update algorithms, help promote traditional and new Internet multi-party applications such as video conferencing or distance education. We propose a framework for marrying such approaches with access management mechanisms and applications in real environments. Furthermore, we extend this framework with anonymisation techniques for the sake of the individual’s privacy. Our solution combines traditional unicast based approaches for privacy with authenticated and encrypted group communication. Thereby, we are able to build closed groups in which the members are not disclosed to outsiders. The introduced secure and anonymous multicast (SAM) framework can be employed as a scalable, configurable architecture for pseudonym based group communication between qualified entities.