Scalable and Fault Tolerant Group Key Management

To address the group key management problem for modern networks this research proposes a lightweight group key management protocol with a gossip-based dissemination routine. Experiments show that by slightly increasing workload for the key update mechanism, this protocol is superior to currently available tree-based protocols with respect to reliability and fault tolerance, while remaining scalable to large groups. In addition, it eliminates the need for logical key hierarchy while preserving an overall reduction in rekey messages to rekey a group. The protocol provides a simple "pull" mechanism to ensure perfect rekeys in spite of the primary rekey mechanism's probabilistic guarantees, without burdening key distribution facilities. Benefits of this protocol are quantified versus tree-based dissemination in Java simulations on networks exhibiting various node failure rates.