| University of Ulm | |
| Department of Theoretical Computer Science | |
| Germany |
Security is not always considered an important issue for groups of distributed systems. Message authentication and encryption are often disregarded, sometimes just because of missing implementations. Nevertheless, especially in the context of communication, control and monitoring, security is an extremely important issue.
This paper discusses techniques that address some of the basic security requirements for unreliable group communication scenarios. It combines existing security technologies (DH, GDH [STW96], DSA, AES) and communication protocols/schemes (IPv6, Multicast) for group collaboration scenarios in unreliable environments. Message authentication and message stream encryption for groups, to only mention the most important ones, are considered exemplary. The architecture and its communication primitives are tailored to the needs of unreliable environments. This is mostly due to its intended field of application: groups of autonomous mobile systems.
The architecture is designed for a wide variety of systems and open in the sense of extensibility. For the proposed techniques, i.e. key agreement, authentication and encryption, very simple yet extensible protocols are used. Because of the many unsolved problems in the area of secure ad-hoc communication, and due to the wide variety of involved scientific subjects, only a superficial solution can be presented.