Towards a Secure Development Environment for Collaborative Applications

Abstract

Collaborative applications use the security services offered by secure socket layer / transport layer security (SSL/TLS) to implement authentication and confidentiality. Since SSL/TLS establishes a secure communication between two participants, for a secure network of n (> 2) participants, at least n(n-1)/2 secure communication channels have to be established. Whereas, a group key agreement (GKA) protocol allows the participants to compute a common secret group key as a function of the secrets of participants, and thereby remove the n(n-1)/2 lower bound on the channel requirement. Partial forward secrecy is a property of the GKA protocol which assesses the secrecy of the group key, when the secrets are compromised. Collaborative applications have different security requirements. Hence, the Spread Toolkit offers a set of GKA protocols, so that the designers can choose the most appropriate one. In this article, given a set of GKA protocols, a method is proposed to select the best among them, with respect to partial forward secrecy.