Scalable Group Key Exchange for Securing Distributed Operating Systems
JUNGHYUN NAM1, MINKYU PARK1,+, SANGCHUL HAN1, JURYON PAIK2 AND DONGHO WON2 1Department of Computer Engineering Konkuk University Chungju-si, 380-701 Korea 2Department of Computer Engineering Sungkyunkwan University Suwon-si, 440-746 Korea
Distributed operating systems are designed to run over a collection of computing nodes that are spatially disseminated and communicate through a computer network. The computing nodes interact collaboratively with each other in order to pursue a common purpose. Protecting group communication between the collaborating nodes against potential attacks is one of the major challenges faced by the designers of distributed operating systems. This challenge can be effectively addressed by a group key exchange (GKE) protocol which allows a group of communicating parties to build a secure multicast channel over an insecure network. In this work, we propose a scalable GKE protocol that achieves both constant round complexity and logarithmic computation complexity. Our GKE protocol achieves its scalability by employing a complete binary tree structure combined with a so-called “nonce-chained authentication technique”. Besides the scalability, our protocol features provable security against active adversaries in a well-defined communication model.