Dependable and Secure Distributed Systems Lab

Group communication systems are a powerful tool in designing collaborative applications. Enhancing group communication systems with security services provides a strong platform for easily developing secure and efficient secure collaborative services.

Secure Spread system integrates security services with the Spread Group Communication Toolkit that provides data confidentiality and integrity, in a group setting. The project investigates the use of key agreement protocols as building blocks for our security services. Such protocols have the advantage that they provide strong security services such as key independence and perfect forward secrecy. The security of Secure Spread relies on a group key management protocol that is efficient, robust to process crashes and network partitions and merges, and protects confidentiality of the data even when long-term keys of the participants are compromised.

Related Publications

Secure Group Communication Using Robust Contributory Key Agreement In IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) vol.15 no.5, 2004. Yair Amir, Yongdae Kim, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Jonathan Stanton, and Gene Tsudik [PS], [PS.GZ], [PDF].

On the Performance of Group Key Agreement Protocols. ACM Transactions on Information Systems Security (TISSEC), vol. 7, no. 3, August 2004. Yair Amir, Yongdae Kim, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, and Gene Tsudik. [PDF].

Secure Spread: An Integrated Architecture for Secure Group Communication Yair Amir, Cristina Nita-Rotaru , Jonathan Stanton and Gene Tzudik. In IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), vol. 2, no. 3. Sept. 2005. Also Technical Report. June 2004. [PDF].

Scaling Secure Group Communication Systems: Beyond Peer-to-Peer In the Proceedings of DISCEX3, Washington DC, April 22-24, 2003. Obsoletes Technical Report CNDS-2002-3, October 2002. Yair Amir, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Jonathan Stanton, and Gene Tsudik. [PS], [PS.GZ], [PDF], [BIB].

On the Performance of Group Key Agreement Protocols. Published in the Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Vienna, Austria, July 2-5, 2002, short paper. A complete version is available below as Technical Report CNDS-2001-5, November 2001. YairAmir, Yongdae Kim, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, and Gene Tsudik. [PS], [PS.GZ], [PDF], [BIB].

Exploring Robustness in Group Key Agreement. Published in the Proceedings of the 21th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Phoenix, Arizona, April 16-19, 2001, pp 399-408. Nominated for Best Paper Award. Yair Amir, Yongdae Kim, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, John Schultz, Jonathan Stanton, and Gene Tsudik. [PS], [PS.GZ], [PDF], [BIB].

Secure Group Communication in Asynchronous Networks with Failures: Integration and Experiments Published in the Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Taipei, Taiwan, April 10-13, 2000, pp 330-343. Yair Amir, Giuseppe Ateniese, Damian Hasse, Yongdae Kim, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Theo Schlossnagle, John Schultz, Jonathan Stanton, and Gene Tsudik [PS], [PS.GZ], [PDF], [BIB].

Framework for Authentication and Access Control of Client-Server Group Communication Systems Published in the Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Networked Group Communication, London, UK November 7-9 2001. Yair Amir, Cristina Nita-Rotaru,and Jonathan Stanton. [PS], [PS.GZ]. [BIB].

Send your comments and questions to Cristina Nita-Rotaru