-------------------------------------------------------------------------------	
                   B O S T O N   U N I V E R S I T Y
                      Computer Science Department
                          C O L L O Q U I U M
                     Wednesday, November 29, 3:00 PM 
                       (Coffee served at 2:45PM)
                         Seminar Room / MCS 135


DISEC: A distributed group key management protocol for secure
multicasting

Lakshminath R. Dondeti
Nortel Networks 

IP multicast protocols keep receivers anonymous.  For commercial and
military applications, senders or service providers need to know who
the receivers are, to i) ensure only the authorized hosts receive
multicast data and/or ii) charge the receivers.  We achieve receiver
access control, by encrypting multicast data and distributing the
secret key only to the authorized receivers.  There have been several
solutions for scalable group key management.  But most of them use a
centralized group manager, which could become a performance bottleneck
in large and dynamic groups.

In the absence of strong infrastructure support for secure
multicasting, it is desirable to have all participants evenly share
the rekeying overhead.  In this talk, we propose a distributed group
key management protocol.  We divide key management overhead evenly
among all participants.  The protocol is scalable and has several nice
properties that allow for some of the group communications to continue
even in the presence of network partitions and other failures.  It
does expect all participants (receivers and senders alike) to adhere
to the key distribution protocol.

Biography:
Lakshminath Dondeti received his B.E. from Motilal Nehru Regional
Engineering College, Allahabad, India, M.S. and PhD from University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, all in Computer Science.  He is currently with the
advanced technology group at Nortel Networks.  His research interests
are in the areas of multicasting, secure group communication, network
security and distributed systems.

Host: Ibrahim Matta (matta@cs.bu.edu)