[Colloq] PhD Thesis Defense, Feng Zhu

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer Science
PhD Thesis Defense
Feng Zhu

will speak on
”On the Design and Analysis of Efficient Group Key Management Schemes for Secure Multicast" 

Monday, December 10, 2007
10:00am
366 West Village H

Abstract:
Multicast is an efficient mechanism for one-to-many communication in terms of usage of network resources. With the growth of data communication, more and more applications are depending on multicast.  Examples can be found in interactive gaming, stock data distribution, video and voice conferences, etc. All of these applications require privacy and authenticity of the participants. Therefore, cryptography plays a significant role in securing multicast. In a distributed environment, the challenges to supporting secure applications are further complicated by considerations such as scalability, as well as dynamic changes 
of group memberships.

This dissertation considers secure multicast communication within the single sender and multi receivers model. It aims to develop schemes to reduce computational overhead at the time of key generation, and to minimize the amount of message units needed during key updates. We analyze several known, heuristic key generation and distribution schemes that are based on rooted trees, and show that these schemes can be inefficient if the tree structure is not balanced. 

We propose an optimal key tree structure for batch rekeying in order to realize efficient group key updates for secure multicast. We analyze and design a group key management schemes with guaranteed performance. In addition, an adaptive system for group key management is implemented.
 
In mobile ad hoc wireless network, the energy spent in transmitting key updates depends on the positions and the routing paths of the receivers.  We analyze the routing-aware optimal key distribution tree structure. We discuss the design of a logical key hierarchy for distributed group key management.
 
Committee: 
Prof. Agnes H. Chan (advisor) 
Prof. Guevara Noubir 
Prof. Rajmohan Rajaraman 
Prof. Guang Gong, Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Univ of Waterloo