The software architecture of a secure and efficient group key agreement protocol

Group communications are becoming popular in Internet applications such as videoconferences, on-line chatting programs, games, and gambling. Secure and efficient group communication is needed for message integration, confidentiality, and system usability. However, the conventional group key agreement protocols are too much focused on minimizing the computational overhead by concentrating on generating the common group key efficiently for secure communication. As a result, the common group key is generated efficiently but a failure in authentication allows adversaries to obtain valuable information during the group communication. After achieving the secure group communication, the secure group communication should generate the group key efficiently and distribute it to group members securely, so the balance of security and system usage must be considered at the same time. Therefore, this research proposes the software architecture model of a secure and efficient group communication that will be imbedded into networking applications.