A hybrid scheme for multicast authentication over lossy networks

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For multicast communication, authentication is a challenging problem, since it requires that a large number of recipients must verify the data originator. Many of multicast applications are running over IP networks, in which several packet losses could occur. Therefore, multicast authentication protocols must resist packet loss. Other requirements of multicast authentication protocols are: to perform authentication in real-time and to have low communication and computation overheads. In the present paper, a hybrid scheme for authenticating real-time data applications, in which low delay at the sender is acceptable, is proposed. In order to provide authentication, the proposed scheme uses both public key signature and hash functions. It is based on the idea of dividing the stream into blocks of m packets. Then a chain of hashes is used to link each packet to the one preceding it. In order to resist packet loss, the hash of each packet is appended to another place in the stream. Finally, the first packet is signed. The proposed scheme resists packet loss and is joinable at any point. The proposed scheme is compared to other multicast authentication protocols. The comparison shows that the proposed scheme has the following advantages: first, it has low computation and communication overheads. Second, it has reasonable buffer requirements. Third, the proposed scheme has a low delay at the sender side and no delay at the receiver side, assuming no loss occurs. Finally, its latency equals to zero, assuming no loss occurs.