This paper presents the results of a performance evaluation of group security mechanisms achieving different qualities of protection. It is shown that there is a tradeoff between performance and quality of protection but also that scalability needs special consideration in the design of group authentication protocols.#R##N##R##N#By using the distributed graphical editor MultiGraph as a testbed, the measurements give a good indication of the feasibility of secure synchronous distributed group applications. The measurements revealed that the delays introduced by the security services are well acceptable for MultiGraph.
['Andrew M. Hutchinson', 'Michael Wallbaum']
A Performance Comparison of Group Security Mechanisms