Queue-based Group Key Agreement Protocol

Group communication is exploding in Internet applications such as video conferences, online chatting programs, games, and gambling. Since most group communication takes place over the Internet that is a wide open network, security plays a major role. For a secure communication, the integrity of messages, member authentication, and confidentiality must be provided among group members. To maintain message integrity, all group members use a Group Key (GK) for encrypting and decrypting messages during group communication. Secure and efficient group key managements have been developed to generate a GK efficiently. Tree-based Group Diffie-Hellman (TGDH) is an efficient group key agreement protocol to generate the GK. TGDH and other group key generation protocols assume that all members have an equal computing power. However, one of the characteristics of a distributed computing environment is heterogeneity; the member can be at a workstation, a laptop, or even a mobile computer. TGDH and other group key generation protocols assume all members have an equal computing power. However, one of the characteristics of distributed computing is heterogeneity. Therefore, this research considers member’s diversity and proposes enhanced group key generation protocol with filtering out low performance members in group key generating processes to improve the efficiency of GK processes.