Elliptic Curve for Secure Group Key Management in Distributed Network

Group communication emphasis an important security criterion in the design of a distributed network. All the members of the group must agree to a common session key. The management of this session key refers to the group key management which is based on some group key agreement protocol. In this paper we propose a group key management method for secure group communication in a distributed network. Frequent change in group membership, and managing the key distribution for new members are the two main problems to be faced in group communication that too with minimal computation and communication overhead. Our system uses the concept of Elliptic curve Cryptography that provide same level of security as that of other cryptosysytems with reduced key size. This results in less re-keying and re-distribution operations, thus reducing computation and communication overheads respectively.