Distributed registration and key distribution (DiRK)

This paper proposes a technique that can be used in a conferencing system to handle participants registration and key distribution in a decentralized and distributed way. The technique is named DiRK, an acronym derived from Distributed Registration and Key distribution. The basic idea of DiRK is to distinguish between active and passive participants in a particular conference session, and to have the active participants assist the session holder to register participants and distribute session keys accordingly. As an exemplary application, the paper also addresses the use of DiRK in the context of multimedia conferencing over the Internet Multicast Backbone (MBone).