As users and companies begin to rely heavily on the Internet for day-to-day operations, issues such as security and privacy become ever more important in the areas of computer communications and networking. Secure group communications (SGC) refers to a setting in which a group of participants can send and receive messages in a way that outsiders are unable to glean any information even when they are able to intercept the messages.
Group key management (GKM) is the most important issue in SGC. This project will focus on SGC GKM in wired networks as well as in wireless environments. In particular, new, scalable, fault-tolerant, block-free, and burst-efficient GKM protocols will be designed and tested. Theoretical analysis of complexities (time, space, and communication) and experimental simulations for GKM protocols will be performed. Prototype SGC systems and SGC Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which can be used by industry and SGC application developers will be implemented. The multi-disciplinary research conducted in this project will have a broad impact on graduate and undergraduate education in the areas of information security, cryptography, computational complexity theory, computer networking and telecommunications. The research results from this project will be integrated into regular Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and Information Technology (IT) curricula and findings and software resulting from this project will be disseminated.
