PARTICIPANT REGISTRATION, VALIDATION, AND KEY DISTRIBUTION FOR LARGE-SCALE CONFERENCING SYSTEMS

DiRK (Distributed Registration and Key distribution) is a technique th at can be used in large-scale conferencing systems to handle participa nt registration, validation, and key distribution in a decentralized a nd distributed way. The basic idea is to distinguish active and passiv e participants in a conference session, and to have the active partici pants assist the session holder to register participants and distribut e session keys accordingly. This article introduces the basic principl es of DIRK and overviews a prototype implementation for the Internet M ulticast Backbone (MBone). As an exemplary application, the article al so addresses the use of DIRK in distance education and teleteaching.