Enabling Secure Ad-hoc Collaboration

A secure collaboration environment should be designed to support informal, spontaneous collaborations as well as highly structured environments. Using on-line tools, it should be easy to begin collaborating, and incrementally add users and services as needed. Ideally, the collaboration environment should not depend on any specific resource or server; instead, the resources and servers should add value to the system when they are present. In this paper we describe an approach, built upon secure and reliable multicast communication, that leads to this ideal.