Introduction

SEcure communicAtion Library (SEAL)* is a Linux-based C language API which provides necessary software components for developers to write secure group-oriented applications. The goal of the library is to implement secure group key agreement protocols with which group members can establish a common secret group key for secure and private communication. These protocols offer several important characteristics:

• distributed nature in which there is no centralized key server,
• collaborative nature in which the group key is contributory (i.e., each group member will collaboratively contribute its part to the global group key), and
• dynamic nature in which existing members may leave the group while new members may join.

Potential Applications

The library supports a number of applications which include but are not limited to:

• secure chat-rooms,
• audio/video conferencing applications,
• file sharing tools,
• router communiation paradigms, and
• secure communication for network games in strategy planning.

Demo Applications

Based on SEAL, we built two demo applications: Chatter and Gauger. They are described as follows.

Applications	Description
Chatter	It is a secure chat-room application allowing group members to communicate with encrypted text in real-time. It supports both GUI mode and text mode.
Gauger	It is a performance testing tool that aims to analyze the performance of conducting rekeying operations under real network settings.

Both applications reveal the strengths of using SEAL in the development of secure group-oriented applications for a peer-to-peer or mobile ad-hoc environment.

* The previous name is Secure Group Communication Library (SGCL).