On the Performance of Group Key Agreement Protocols

Group key agreement is a fundamental building block for secure peer group communication systems. Several group key agreement protocols were proposed in the last decade, all of them assuming the existence of an underlying group communication infrastructure. This paper presents a performance evaluation of five notable key agreement protocols for peer groups, integrated with a reliable group communication system (Spread). They are: Centralized Group Key Distribution (CKD), Burmester-Desmedt (BD), Steer et al. (STR), Group DiffieHellman (GDH) and Tree-Based Group Diffie-Hellman (TGDH). The paper includes an in-depth comparison and analysis of conceptual results and is the first to report practical results in real-life local and wide area networks. Our analysis of these protocols’ experimental results offers insights into their scalability and practicality.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Yair Amir, Yongdae Kim, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Gene Tsudik
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Group Communication, Group Key Agreement, ICDCS 2002, Key Agreement Protocols