Authors: Ran Canetti, Juan Garay, Gene Itkis, Daniele Micciancio, Moni Naor and Benny Pinkas
In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies - INFOCOM 1999. Volume 2, pages 708--716. March 1999.
Abstract:Multicast communication is becoming the basis for a growing number of applications. It is therefore critical to provide sound security mechanisms for multicast communication. Yet, existing security protocols for multicast offer only partial solutions. We first present a taxonomy of multicast scenarios on the Internet and point out relevant security concerns. Next we address two major security problems of multicast communication: source authentication, and key revocation. Maintaining authenticity in multicast protocols is a much more complex problem than for unicast; in particular, known solutions are prohibitively inefficient in many cases. We present a solution that is reasonable for a range of scenarios. Our approach can be regarded as a `midpoint' between traditional Message Authentication Codes and digital signatures. We also present an improved solution to the key revocation problem.