Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Many distributed applications require a secure reliable group communication system to provide coordination among the application components. This paper describes a secure group layer (SGL) which bundles a reliable group communication system, a group authorization and access control mechanism, and a group key agreement protocol to provide a comprehensive and practical secure group communication platform. SGL also encapsulates the standard mes sage security services (i.e, confidentiality, authenticity and integrity). A number of challenging issues encountered in the design of SGL are brought to light and experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation are discussed.