Secure and Anonymous Multicast Framework

Abstract

The rapid increase in Internet users triggered a number of new Internet services and applications such as online shopping, video conferencing, Internet games or distance education. A larger part of those ones requires multicast support for efficient data distribution. A number of secure group communication protocols have been published recently, but the preservation of privacy of the single group member is still an unsolved problem. This paper presents a novel approach to secure and anonymous group communication. First, we propose a solution for anonymity in a local environment based on state-of-the art approaches such as pseudonym servers and anonymizers combined with encryption techniques on different protocol levels in order to guarantee an anonymous way of communication between end-users. Then, we introduce the secure and anonymous multicast (SAM) framework and we show how it can be used as a configurable, scalable architecture in combination with local anonymity.KeywordsScalable end-to-end anonymous communicationcomposable privacyanonymous multicast