The design of conference key distribution system employing a symmetric balanced incomplete block design

Abstract

A conference key distribution system is a scheme to generate a conference key, and then to distribute this key to only participants attending the conference in order to communicate with each other securely. In this paper, an efficient conference key distribution system is presented by employing a symmetric balanced incomplete block design (SBIBD), one class of block designs. Through techniques for creating a conference key and for performing authentication based on identification information, the communication protocol is designed. The protocol presented minimizes the message overhead for generating a conference key. In a special class of SBIBD the message overhead is O(v v ) , where v is the number of participants. The security of the protocol, which is a significant problem in the construction of a secure system, can be proved as computationally difficult to calculate as factoring and discrete logarithms.