Participant registration, validation, and key distribution for large-scale conferencing systems

DiRK (Distributed Registration and Key distribution) is a technique that can be used in large-scale conferencing systems to handle participant registration, validation, and key distribution in a decentralized and distributed way. The basic idea is to distinguish active and passive participants in a conference session, and to have the active participants assist the session holder to register participants and distribute session keys accordingly. This article introduces the basic principles of DiRK and overviews a prototype implementation for the Internet Multicast Backbone (MBone). As an exemplary application, the article also addresses the use of DiRK in distance education and teleteaching.