Abstract:
Recently, due to the rapid growth of the computer network, many modern application environments involve dynamic peer groups which tend to be relatively small in size and mutate group membership dynamically. Given the openness of today's networks, communication among group members must be secured while maintaining the availability and efficiency of the system.The general secured protocol in context type of dynamic peer groups should be concentrated on secured and efficient group key agreement, secured key authentication, key confirmation and key integrity. All these provide a number of different scenarios of group membership changes that enable addition and exclusion of group members. This thesis proposed a new protocol, called "Backward authenticated multi-party key agreement protocol" (BA-GDH), to solve security problem for such kind of communication. In order to provide the security services listed above, the BA-GDH protocol performs directly on entities authentication. Each member can verify all previous members in order, and prove that only those members specified can be engaging in the protocol. The first advantage is having ironclad security in a group. Second, it reduces time latency from failure of key generating. The protocol is provably secure against passive adversaries and can be used for practical application. This thesis presented and demonstrated the BA-GDH model in various point of views. The implementation and experimentation under a simulation environment were presented. The discussion and evaluation of the results suggest that further improvement is needed in this area.