Dynamic join-exit amortization and scheduling for time-efficient group key agreement

We propose a time-efficient contributory key agreement framework for secure communications in dynamic groups. The proposed scheme employs a special join-tree/exit-tree topology in the logical key tree and effectively exploits the efficiency of amortized operations. We derive the optimal parameters and design an activation algorithm for the join and exit trees. We also show that the asymptotic average time cost per user join and leave event is theta;(log (log n)), where n is the group size. Our experiment results on both simulated user activities and the real MBone data have shown that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing tree-based schemes.