A Role-based Secure Group Communication Framework

Building a secure group communication system is an active research topic. Several studies have focused on achieving a good level of privacy among a group of people via agreement on a shared encryption key. However, there is not much work published on easily manageable, simple, and effective systems that can provide secure communication in a role-based environment. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive solution to the key exchange problem for group communication. A centralized key server is used to produce a key chain, based on recursive hashing, and securely distributing the keys to the recipients according to their roles. The proposed work makes it possible that a user with a higher clearance can audit the communications among the users that are hierarchically below him/her. Moreover, the system has the ability to isolate communications among different groups, which means the compartmentation is reserved.