Application
Group communication occurs in many different settings: from low-level network multicasting to conferencing and other groupware applications. In particular, group communication is often crucial in battlefield and law enforcement operations. Regardless of the environment, security services are necessary to provide communication privacy and integrity. These are not possible without secure and efficient key distribution, authentication and other security mechanisms.

Motivation
While peer-to-peer security is a well-developed field, secure group communication remains relatively unexplored. The prime motivation for CLIQUES is the lack of a general-purpose group security solution that satisfies the requirements of modern group communication security.

Goal
The primary goal of the CLIQUES project is to design a suite of highly secure key distribution, authentication and other auxiliary protocols for group communication. These protocols will be subsequently realized in a general-purpose CLIQUES toolkit which, additionally, will address the challenges of communication latency and state. The resulting technology will be demonstrated in different application domains.

Group Setting
CLIQUES supports dynamic group membership in response to the actual requirements of current and emerging group-oriented applications for dynamic peer group. Group membership operations at the granularity of individual members and entire sub-groups is addressed in a secure and efficient manner. Dynamic peer groups are relatively small, non-hierarchical groups typically geared for replication or collaborative applications. CLIQUES favors neither a specific network topology not a specific communication paradigm.

Security
CLIQUES supports highly secure operation. Its protocols are the group extensions of the well-known Diffie-Hellman key exchange. CLIQUES provides authenticated contributory key agreement which guarantees key independence, key confirmation, perfect forward secrecy, and resistance to known key attacks. (For the definition of the above, the reader is referred to Handbook of Applied Cryptogrphy.)