Summary: Exploring Robustness in Group Key Agreement 
Yair Amir y Yongdae Kim z Cristina Nita­Rotaru y John Schultz y Jonathan Stanton y
Gene Tsudik x
Abstract
Secure group communication is crucial for building
distributed applications that work in dynamic envi­
ronments and communicate over unsecured networks
(e.g. the Internet). Key agreement is a critical part of
providing security services for group communication
systems. Most of the current contributory key agree­
ment protocols are not designed to tolerate failures
and membership changes during execution. In par­
ticular, nested or cascaded group membership events
(such as partitions) are not accommodated.
In this paper we present the first robust contribu­
tory key agreement protocols resilient to any sequence
of events while preserving the group communication
membership and ordering guarantees.
1 Introduction
The explosive growth of the Internet has increased

Source: Amir, Yair - Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University
Nita-Rotaru, Cristina - Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences