Over the past decade, group communications have gained attention mainly due to efficient bandwidth usage and low latency. Many applications may benefit from group communications including teleconferencing, telemedicine, collaborative work, and online interactive games. One technical challenge, however, is how to secure such communications by providing privacy and authentication. This talk will be a tutorial of problems, solutions and related techniques in secure group communications. After an overview of secure group communications, I will present basic group key management schemes. I will then continue to discuss tree based key management schemes in both centralized and distributed versions. If time allows, I will also discuss more advanced issues including dynamic conferencing schemes and hierarchical access control in secure group communications.
Colloquia Series page.