Asynchronous group key exchange with failures

Abstract

Group key exchange protocols allow a group of servers communicating over an asynchronous network of point-to-point links to establish a common key, such that an adversary which fully controls the network links (but not the group members) cannot learn the key. Currently known group key exchange protocols rely on the assumption that all group members participate in the protocol and if a single server crashes, then no server may terminate the protocol. In this paper, we propose the first purely asynchronous group key exchange protocol that tolerates a minority of servers to crash. Our solution uses a constant number of rounds, which makes it suitable for use in practice. Furthermore, we also investigate how to provide forward secrecy with respect to an adversary that may break into some servers and observe their internal state. We show that any group key exchange protocol among n servers that tolerates tc > 0 servers to crash can only provide forward secrecy if the adversary breaks into less than n - 2tc servers, and propose a group key exchange protocol that achieves this bound.