Research On Some Key Issues Of Multicast Security

As the basis of many current Internet applications, multicast has become a hottest research topic now. Because of the importance and urgency of security to multicast, this thesis investigates two key issues, i.e. authentication and group key management, of multicast security.Multicast security contains access control, authentication, confidence of multicast data transmission and etc. Among these, authentication is the bottleneck. Because of its inherent characteristics, such as multi-participant, using UDP as protocols, many efficient authentication schemes in unicast communication cannot be applied into multicast communications directly. Based on the analysis of available multicast authentication schemes, two multicast packet authentication schemes are presented. It is shown that these two schemes have advantages in resisting packet-loss, communication overhead, computation complexity etc, and thus they are suitable for multicast environment.Multicast confidential is realized by sharing a group key and encrypting communication data by the group key. How to distribute, manage and update this key is key of multicast security. This thesis introduces available multicast group key management schemes and analyzes their advantages and disadvantages. The security of OFT scheme is the emphasis. The vulnerabilities of OFT scheme in forward and backward security are unveiled and some improvements are given.