Secure Key Management in Hierarchical Group Communication Using Agents

Group communication systems are high-availability distributed systems providing reliable and ordered message delivery, as well as membership service to group-oriented applications. One of the most important issues in group communication is secure key management or in other words, confidentiality. Although hierarchical group communication is a prominent model, it has not been investigated in security literature as well as other model. There has been an extensive research on satisfying confidentiality in group communications on different 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 using agents´ theory. The simulation results show that using agents improve and achieve more performance and reduced network bandwidth comparing with other models