Principles of Policy in Secure Groups.

Security policy is increasingly being used as a vehicle for specifying complex entity relationships. When used to define group security, policy must be extended to state the entirety of the security context. For this reason, the policy requirements of secure groups are more complex than found in traditional peer communication; group policies convey information about associations greater and more abstract than their pair-wise counterparts. This paper identifies and illustrates universal requirements of secure group policy and reasons about the adherence of the Group Security Association Key Management Protocol (GSAKMP) to these principles. 1. Introduction The use of widely distributed resources on the Internet has strained existing network infrastructures. Until recently, applications and services were targeted to environments spanning few administrative domains supporting a relatively static user community. However, the explosion of new forms of communication has invalidated many of ...