Agent Based Bandwidth Reduction for Key Management in Hierarchical Group Communication

One of the most important issues in secrecy of group communication is confidentiality. In order to satisfying confidentiality, symmetric cryptography must be exploited. All symmetric algorithms require a common key between the members. High frequency in the number of joining members can cause massive flow of data between authorized group members. Although hierarchical group communication is a prominent model, it has not been investigated in security literature as well as other models. There has been an extensive research on satisfying confidentiality in group communications on different architecture other than the hierarchical architecture and the proposed hierarchical models do not use the concept of agents. In this paper, we investigate a new approach to secure key management in hierarchical group communication by means of bandwidth reduction. This can be accomplished by using agents. The simulation results show that using agents reduce network bandwidth and improve and achieve more performance comparing with other models.