Abstract
Survivability and secure communications are essential in a mobile computing environment. In a secure network, all the hosts must be authenticated before communicating, and failure of the agents that authenticate the hosts may completely detach the hosts from the rest of the network. In this paper, we describe two techniques to eliminate such a single point of failure. Both of these approaches make use of backup servers, but they differ in the way they are organized and deployed. We evaluate our proposed architectures with threats and performance issues in group (multicast) communications in mobile computing environments. We propose a scheme for efficient key distribution and management using key graphs to provide secure multicast service.
Keywords
authentication, fault-tolerance, key management, mobile
