Secure and Efficient Tree-based Group Diffie-Hellman Protocol

Current group key agreement protocols (often tree-based) involve unnecessary delays because members with low-performance computer systems can join group key computation. These delays are caused by the computations needed to balance a key tree after membership changes. An alternate approach to group key generation that reduces delays is the dynamic prioritizing mechanism of filtering low performance members in group key generation. This paper presents an efficient tree-based group key agreement protocol and the results of its performance evaluation. The proposed approach to filtering of low performance members in group key generation is scalable and it requires less computational overhead than conventional tree-based protocols.