Published Paper Details:

We study the problem of key generation for secure many to many communications. The problem is raised by the proliferation of large scale distributed file system supporting parallel access to multiple storage devices. Our work focuses on current Internet standards for such file systems, i.e. the parallel Network File System (pNFS), which makes use of Kerberos to establish parallel session keys between client and storage devices. Our review of the existing Kerberos-based protocol has a number of limitations: (i) a metadata server facilitating key exchange between clients and storage devices has heavy workload which restricts the scalability of the protocol; (ii) the protocol does not provide forward secrecy; (iii) metadata server establish itself all the session keys that are used between the clients and storage devices, and this inherently leads to the key escrow. In this paper, we propose a variety of authenticated key exchange protocols that are designed to address above issues. We show that our protocols are capable of reducing up to approximately 54% of workload of a metadata server and concurrently supporting forward secrecy and escrow-freeness.