As a result of the increased popularity of grouporiented applications and protocols, group communication occurs in many different settings: from network multicasting to application layer tele- and video-conferencing. Regardless of the application environment, security services are necessary to provide communication privacy and integrity. This paper considers the problem of key agreementindynamic peer groups. (Key agreement, especially in a group setting, is the steeping stone for all other security services.) Dynamic peer groups require not only initial key agreement (IKA) but also auxiliary key agreement (AKA) operations such as member addition, member deletion and group fusion. We discuss all group key agreement operations and present a concrete protocol suite, CLIQUES, which offers complete key agreement services. CLIQUES is based on multi-party extensions of the well-known Diffie-Hellman key exchange method. The protocols are efficient and provably secure against passiveadversari...

Secure group communication is an increasingly popular research area having received much attention in recent years. The fundamental challenge revolves around secure and efficient group key management. While centralized methods are often appropriate for key distribution in large groups, many collaborative group settings require distributed key agreement techniques. This work investigates a novel approach to group key agreement by blending binary key trees with Diffie-Hellman key exchange. The resultant protocol suite is very simple, secure and fault-tolerant. Moreover, its efficiency surpasses that of prior art.

Abstract. We deal with the problem of a center sending a message to a group of users such that some subset of the users is considered revoked and should not be able to obtain the content of the message. We concentrate on the stateless receiver case, where the users do not (necessarily) update their state from session to session. We present a framework called the Subset-Cover framework, which abstracts a variety of revocation schemes including some previously known ones. We provide sufficient conditions that guarantees the security of a revocation algorithm in this class. We describe two explicit Subset-Cover revocation algorithms; these algorithms are very flexible and work for any number of revoked users. The schemes require storage at the receiver of log N and 1 2 log2 N keys respectively (N is the total number of users), and in order to revoke r users the required message lengths are of r log N and 2r keys respectively. We also provide a general traitor tracing mechanism that can be integrated with any Subset-Cover revocation scheme that satisfies a “bifurcation property”. This mechanism does not need an a priori bound on the number of traitors and does not expand the message length by much compared to the revocation of the same set of traitors. The main improvements of these methods over previously suggested methods, when adopted to the stateless scenario, are: (1) reducing the message length to O(r) regardless of the coalition size while maintaining a single decryption at the user’s end (2) provide a seamless integration between the revocation and tracing so that the tracing mechanisms does not require any change to the revocation algorithm.

A prerequisite for secure communication between two nodes in an ad hoc network is that the nodes share a key to bootstrap their trust relationship. In this paper, we present a scalable and distributed protocol that enables two nodes to establish a pairwise shared key on the fly, without requiring the use of any on-line key distribution center. The design of our protocol is based on a novel combination of two techniques – probabilistic key sharing and threshold secret sharing. Our protocol is scalable since every node only needs to possess a small number of keys, independent of the network size, and it is computationally efficient because it only relies on symmetric key cryptography based operations. We show that a pairwise key established between two nodes using our protocol is secure against a collusion attack by up to a certain number of compromised nodes. We also show through a set of simulations that our protocol can be parameterized to meet the desired levels of performance, security and storage for the application under consideration. 1

We introduce the BiBa signature scheme, a new signature construction that uses one-way functions without trapdoors. BiBa features a low verification overhead and a relatively small signature size. In comparison to other one-way function based signature schemes, BiBa has smaller signatures and is at least twice as fast to verify (which probably makes it one of the fastest signature scheme to date for verification) . On the downside, the BiBa public key is large, and the signature generation overhead is higher than previous schemes based on one-way functions without trapdoors (although it can be trivially parallelized).

Abstract — The quality of peer-to-peer content distribution can suffer when malicious participants intentionally corrupt content. Some systems using simple block-by-block downloading can verify blocks with traditional cryptographic signatures and hashes, but these techniques do not apply well to more elegant systems that use rateless erasure codes for efficient multicast transfers. This paper presents a practical scheme, based on homomorphic hashing, that enables a downloader to perform on-the-fly verification of erasure-encoded blocks. I.

We consider the authentication of digital streams over a lossy network. The overall approach taken is graph-based, as this yields simple methods for controlling overhead, delay, and the ability to authenticate, while serving to unify many previously known hash- and MAC-based techniques. The loss pattern of the network is defined probabilistically, allowing both bursty and random packet loss to be modeled. Our authentication schemes are customizable by the sender of the stream; that is, within reasonable constraints on the input parameters, we provide schemes that achieve the desired authentication probability while meeting the input upper bound on the overhead per packet. In addition, we demonstrate that some of the shortcomings of previously known schemes correspond to easily identifiable properties of a graph, and hence, may be more easily avoided by taking a graph-based approach to designing authentication schemes.

We address the problem of establishing a group key amongst a dynamic group of users over an unreliable, or Iossy, network. We term our key distribution mechanisms self-healing because users' are capable of recovering lost group keys on their own, without requesting additional transmissions from the group manager, thus cutting back on network traffic, decreasing the load on the group manager, and reducing the risk of user exposure through traffic analysis. A user must be a member both before and after the session in which a particular key is sent in order to be able to recover the key through self-healing. Binding the ability to recover keys' to membership status enables the group manager to use short broadcasts' to establish group keys', independent of the group size. In addition, the selfhealing approach to key distribution is stateless, meaning that a group member who has been off-line for some time is able to recover new session keys' immediately after coming back on-line.

. We consider the broadcast exclusion problem: how to transmit a message over a broadcast channel shared by N = 2 n users so that all but some specified coalition of k excluded users can understand the contents of the message. Using error-correcting codes, and avoiding any computational assumptions in our constructions, we construct natural schemes that completely avoid any dependence on n in the transmission overhead. Specifically, we construct: (i) (for illustrative purposes,) a randomized scheme where the server's storage is exponential (in n), but the transmission overhead is O(k), and each user's storage is O(kn); (ii) a scheme based on polynomials where the transmission overhead is O(kn) and each user's storage is O(kn); and (iii) a scheme using algebraic-geometric codes where the transmission overhead is O(k 2 ) and each user is required to store O(kn) keys. In the process of proving these results, we show how to construct very good cover-free set systems and co...

Attributes define, classify, or annotate the datum to which they are assigned. However, traditional attribute architectures and cryptosystems are ill-equipped to provide security in the face of diverse access requirements and environments. In this paper, we introduce a novel secure information management architecture based on emerging attribute-based encryption (ABE) primitives. A policy system that meets the needs of complex policies is defined and illustrated. Based on the needs of those policies, we propose cryptographic optimizations that vastly improve enforcement efficiency. We further explore the use of such policies in two example applications: a HIPAA compliant distributed file system and a social network. A performance analysis of our ABE system and example applications demonstrates the ability to reduce cryptographic costs by as much as 98 % over previously proposed constructions. Through this, we demonstrate that our attribute system is an efficient solution for securely managing information in large, loosely-coupled, distributed systems.