Yair Amir ¡ Exploring Robustness in Group Key Agreement

Cristina Nita-Rotaru ¡ Secure group communication is crucial for building distributed applications that work in dynamic environments 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 agreement protocols are not designed to tolerate failures and membership changes during execution. In particular, nested or cascaded group membership events (such as partitions) are not accommodated. In this paper we present the first robust contributory key agreement protocols resilient to any sequence of events while preserving the group communication membership and ordering guarantees.