Secure Admission Control in Peer Groups on the Internet

Security in peer groups is challenging due to lack of a centralized authority, and due to varied security requirements of its applications. Significant work has been done to solve the security issues of peer groups such as key management and anonymity. However, admission control, an important prerequisite for peer group security is not addressed yet (or assumed), which is extremely challenging as the decision to admit a prospective member to the group has to be collectively made by the current group members. This project aims to provide secure and efficient admission control protocols for group communication system. During the course of this project we intend to design schemes to provide admission control, publish these schemes, and develop a suite of mechanisms that will address the requirements of different peer group applications, such as file sharing, group communication system, and ad-hoc networks. 1 Present Status of Knowledge