A Token Based Key Distribution Protocol for Closed Group Meetings

Many emerging interactive and collaborative applications use the peer-to-peer paradigm nowadays. In every-day life peer-to-peer meetings of small groups are dominant, e.g. for business talks. Confidentiality is of primary concern in this context to provide group privacy. To assure confidentiality the partners have to agree upon a secret group key for encrypting their communication. This requires a secure distributed group key exchange protocol which assures that only active, uniquely authenticated group members know the current session key. In this paper we present a novel distributed key distribution protocol, called TKD, to efficiently support the key renewal in small dynamic peer groups. Performance comparisons show that TKD has a lower key refreshment delay compared to existing key exchange protocols.