Secure and distributed conference-key distribution

This paper introduces a distributed conference key distribution system that utilizes secure multi-party computation scheme by virtue of Feldman´s (t+1, n) VSS to perform the conference key computation, so that a key can be obtained in a distributed fashion in which any t+1 of servers are required to perform the computation. The n segments - which are spread across n machines - do not have to be recombined on a single machine to perform a key computation. Since t≪n, the requirement that only t segments are needed inherently provides system reliability. The evaluation shows that the system performance is not impacted by changing t or n. This means that it is possible to set t arbitrarily high, making key compromise less probable, and to set n high, providing redundancy, without taking a performance hit for a single signature.