Secure Group Communication Over Wired/Wireless Networks

Principal Investigator: Xukai Zou

Secure group communications (SGC) refers to a setting in which a group of participants can send and receive messages (sent to the group members), in a way that outsiders are unable to glean information even if they are able to intercept the messages. SGC is important because several prevalent applications require it. These applications include teleconferencing, tele-medicine, real-time information services, distributed interactive simulations, collaborative work, interactive games and the deployment of VPN (Virtual Private Networks). The goals for this project are four-fold:

1. Study various issues enabling SGC which include, but are not limited to, group key   management, burst behavior and efficient burst operations, group membership    management, group member admission control, authentication and non-repudiation;
2. Study and provide solutions for specific SGC scenarios such as dynamic conferencing and SGC with hierarchical access control;
3. Investigate research challenges for SGC over wireless/mobile environments;
4. Integrate research results into the curriculum and perform public dissemination of findings and software

Personnel

Other PIs: Byrav Ramamurthy (UNL) V. N. Variyam (UNL)

Representative Publications

• X. Zou, B. Ramamurthy and Spyros Magliveras, "Secure Group Communication over Data Networks",  (Oct. 2004).  Springer, ISBN: 0-387-22970-1.

• P. Adusumilli, X. Zou and B. Ramamurthy, DGKD: Distributed Group Key Distribution with  Authentication Capability, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Workshop on Information Assurance        (IAW), United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, 15-17 June 2005, pp. 286–293.

• X. Zou, A. Thukral, and B. Ramamurthy, An Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, LNCS, Springer, Vol. 4325, pp. 509–520, 2006.

• Y.Wang, B. Ramamurthy, and X. Zou, KeyRev: An Efficient Key Revocation Scheme for Wireless  Sensor Networks, Proceedings of IEEE ICC’07, 24-27 June 2007, Scotland, pp.1260 - 1265.

• X. Zou, Y. Dai and E. Bertino, A Practical and Flexible Key Management Mechanism For Trusted    Collaborative Computing, Proceedings of the 27th IEEE INFOCOM, April 13–18, 2008, pp.  1211–1219.

• R. Balachandran, X. Zou, B. Ramamurthy, A. Thurkral, and N. V. Vinodchandran, An Efficient and           Attack-resistant Key Agreement Scheme for Secure Group Communications in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks, Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing. 8(10), 2008, pp. 1297-1312.

• X. Zou, Y. Dai and Y. Pan, Trust and Security in Collaborative Computing, World Scientific, ISBN-13:  978-981-270-3682, January 2008.

Keywords: access control, key management, secure group communication, wireless