Subject: [MSEC] reliability and secure multicast

From: "Sanjeev Setia" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 14:02:20 -0400

Hi,
 My colleagues and I have done some research on customized reliable
 multicast protocols for secure rekey payload transport and thought I'd 
contribute our $0.02 to the discussion on this topic. 
Just a few observations:

1) Customized reliable rekey transport protocols are much more 
lightweight than generic reliable transport protcols (SRM, RMTP, etc).
So if performance (key server bandwidth and key delivery latency)
is important then a case can be made for including the custom reliable
multicast protocol into the group key management protocol.  Of course,
this complicates the engineering of the key management protocol so 
there is a tradeoff involved. But at this stage I believe that
the principles (if not the  implementation-level issues) of 
customized reliable rekey transport protocols are reasonably 
well-explored.

2) Performance and scalability (of the reliable rekey transport) only
  become an issue if the rekey payload is relatively large (because
  rekeying is done in a batched fashion and/or the group membership
  is large and dynamic), and if the network has some level of packet
  loss. For example, if the packet loss rate is 10^-3 as described in
  a previous post to this mailing list on this topic 
  last month, then reliable rekey transport is not a major issue 
  and very simple protocols will more than suffice.

3) For a performance comparison of various rekey transport protocols
   for LKH, see our paper "A Comparative Performance 
    Analysis of Reliable Group Rekey Transport Protocols for Secure 
   Multicast", that appeared in the journal Performance Evaluation, 
    (special issue on  Proceedings of Performance 2002, Rome, Italy, 
   Sept 2000)
  at  the URL: http://www.ise.gmu.edu/techrep/2002/02_05.pdf

4) Regarding reliability and the subset difference algorithm,
   we recently wrote a paper on "Adding Reliable and Self-Healing 
  Key Delivery to the Subset Difference Rekeying Method for Secure 
  Multicast". It will be presented at the Networked Group Communication 
  (NGC 2003) conference in Munich later this year. A preliminary 
  version is available at  http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~setia/ngc03.ps

Sanjeev Setia

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