Conference Key Protocols

As electronic communications and information services become more sophisticated, many applications involving multiple entities become necessary. Since these applications will generally require secure communications it is necessary to design protocols that establish keys for groups of principals. There is a great variety of different practical requirements that may be appropriate in different applications, and the number of protocols is very large. In this chapter we will mainly restrict attention to ways in which the two-party protocols that have been explored in previous chapters can be generalised to the multi-party situation.