Analytical models for the scalability of dynamic group key agreement protocols and secure file sharing systems

Abstract

Dynamic group key agreement protocols are cryptographic primitives to provide secure group communications in decentralized and dynamic networks. Such protocols provide additional operations to update the group key while adding new participants into the group and removing existing participants from the group without re-executing the protocol from the beginning. However, the lack of scalability emerges as one of the most significant issues of dynamic group key agreement protocols when the number of participants in the group increases. For instance, frequent participant join requests for large groups may cause an effect similar to a Distributed Denial of Service attack and violate the system availability due to the increase in group key update time. Therefore, analyzing the scalability of dynamic group key agreement protocols is crucial to detect conditions where the system becomes unavailable. In this thesis, we propose a formal performance model to evaluate the scalability of dynamic group key agreement protocols by using queueing models. We also extend our performance model for evaluating the scalability of secure file sharing systems that utilize group key agreement protocols. Moreover, we present a demonstrative use case to show the applicability of our performance model on an example group key agreement protocol and a secure file sharing system. Furthermore, we design attack models that can be used against communication systems and explain how the target system may be affected by a cyber attack.