SECURE GROUP- REKEYING USING BALANCED BINARY TREE IN DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

Secure group communication is important for building distributed applications that work in dynamic network environments and communicate over insecure networks such as the global Internet. They can be used to building fault tolerant distributed applications. They can also provide support for distributed operating systems, distributed transactions and load balancing. The design and implementation of these distributed applications can be simplified by the group communication system. In distributed group communication systems, there is no single point of failure unlike centralize systems. Though a large number of methods have been proposed and implemented for secure group communication in distributed environment, but they differ from each other in many aspects. These are computational overhead, storage requirement at each member, communicational overhead, distribution of load among group members and delay due to group membership change in new group key agreement. Also, there is no method to reduce the average waiting time for joining members. A lot of methods have already been proposed to solve these problems, but still there are no unique solutions to these problems. In this Dissertation entitled "Secure Group Rekeying using Balanced Binary Tree in Distributed Environment", a solution is proposed for distributed key agreement algorithm which minimizes the computational overhead of group members, storage requirement at each group members and also reduces the average waiting time for joining members. It also ensures the message authentication very easily without the overhead of digitally signed messages. It also reduces the message delivery delay which makes group communication operation faster. The implementation of the proposed work is done using java based event simulator JiST (Java in Simulation Time). The results of the proposed method are compared with the existing methods and improvement is obtained on computational overhead, number of rekeying messages, message delivery delay and average waiting time for the joining members. 111