Summary: On the Performance of Group Key Agreement Protocols 
Yair Amir y Yongdae Kim z Cristina Nita­Rotaru y Gene Tsudik z
Abstract
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 no­
table key agreement protocols for peer groups, integrated
with a reliable group communication system (Spread).
They are: Centralized Group Key Distribution (CKD),
Burmester­Desmedt (BD), Steer et al. (STR), Group Diffie­
Hellman (GDH) and Tree­Based Group Diffie­Hellman
(TGDH). The paper includes an in­depth comparison and
analysis of conceptual results and is the first to report prac­
tical results in real­life local and wide area networks. Our
analysis of these protocols' experimental results offers in­
sights into their scalability and practicality.
Keywords: contributory group key agreement, se­

Source: Amir, Yair - Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences