A SecurityGroup is an abstraction that represents the message security settings and security keys for a subset of NetworkMessages exchanged between Publishers and Subscribers. The security keys are used to encrypt and decrypt NetworkMessages and to generate and check signatures on a NetworkMessage.

A Security Key Service (SKS) manages SecurityGroups and maintains a mapping between Roles and their access Permissions for a SecurityGroup. This mapping defines if a Publisher or Subscriber has access to the security keys of a SecurityGroup. The SKS is described in more detail in 5.4.4.

A SecurityGroup is identified with a unique identifier called the SecurityGroupId. It is unique within the SKS. A Publisher for its PublishedDataSets needs to know the SecurityGroupId. For Subscribers the SecurityGroupId is distributed as metadata together with the DataSetMetaData. The metadata for a SecurityGroupId includes the EndpointDescription of the responsible SKS. Publishers and Subscribers use the EndpointDescription to access the SKS and the SecurityGroupId to obtain the security keys for a SecurityGroup.