Contributory approaches to centralized key agreement in dynamic peer groups

Abstract

This paper has two contributions. In the first part of this paper we propose a new approach to contributory key agreement in dynamic peer groups (DPG) using a central controller. Our approach has certain advantages over other centralized approaches because it can be extended to a distributed environment. We discuss ways to extend our approach to adapt to arbitrary network failures by segregating a large group into smaller subgroups. Since each subgroup still requires access to a central controller, in the second part of this paper, we present a protocol that can be used to adapt to arbitrary network failures that disable the central controller.