SECURITY AND PERFORMANCE OF GROUP KEY AGREEMENT PROTOCOLS

Several group key protocols have been pre- sented in the literature to enable secrecy of communication among dynamic groups of participants. However, there is a lack of consistency in the literature in terms of operations supported and performance metrics of the various proto- cols. This makes it difficult for designers to choose the best protocol for their specific applications. To alleviate this problem we introduce a generic model of group key exchange protocols which we use to prove security proper- ties of the protocols. In addition, we introduce new perfor- mance metrics to be used to assist in uniformly comparing these protocols and then improve the performance of five protocols based on these operations and metrics.