Enhanced Group Key Generation Algorithm

Group communication is becoming increasingly popular in Internet applications such as videoconferences, online chatting programs, games, and gambling. For secure communications, the integrity of messages, member authentication, and confidentiality must be provided among group members. To maintain message integrity, all group members use the group key (GK) for encrypting and decrypting messages while providing enough security to protect against passive attacks. Tree-based group Diffie-Hellman (TGDH) is one of the efficient group key agreement protocols to generate the GK. TGDH assumes all members have an equal computing power. As one of the characteristics of distributed computing is heterogeneity, the member can be at a workstation, a laptop or even a mobile computer. Therefore, the group member sequence should be reordered in terms of the member´s computing power to improve performance. This research proposes a reordering of members in the group key generation tree to enhance the efficiency of the group key generation