New real time multicast authentication protocol

Abstract

Multicast gives professional large-scale content distribution by providing an efficient transport mechanism for one-to-many and many-to-many communications. There is a number of security issues in multicast communication directly related to the specific nature of multicast. In our paper, we concentrate on the multicast authentication problem. Important requirements of multicast communication protocols are: to perform authentication in real-time, to resist packet loss to have low communication and computation overheads. In the present paper, a scheme for authenticating multicast data applications is proposed. In order to provide authentication, the proposed scheme uses both public key signature and symmetric key functions. It is based on the idea of dividing the stream into blocks of m packets. The proposed scheme resists packet loss by using erasure code functions over the signature. To resist pollution attacks, our scheme computes the symmetric encryption of the erasure code output. To resist replay attacks, a counter number is added to each packet. 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. Also it has reasonable buffer requirements. Furthermore, it resists packet loss, pollution and replay attacks. The proposed protocol called Latif-Aslan-Ramly (LAR) is analyzed using BAN logic. The analysis shows that LAR achieves the authentication goals.