Design And Implementation Of An Improved Source Authentication Protocol For Multicast

Multicast transmission introduces security concerns that are far more complex than those of simple unicast. Even dealing with the standard issues of message and secrecy becomes much more complex. In addition many other concerns arised including access control, source authentication, and key management.For multicast security, there are many unsolved issues. Many solutions on multicast security are been in theory so the type of multicast application has become an important factor. The main challenge in efficient multicast transmission is key management and source authentication. This paper focuses on source authentication of the message. Source authentication is one of the most important aspects and basic research field of securing multicast communication, or enabling receivers of multicast data to verify that the received data originated with the claimed source and was not modified enroute. If data was modified, receiver also could distinguish it. The scheme of source authentication not only guarantees the message's validity, but also thinks the speed of forwarding message, the length of message and the communication overhead.This paper first sketch some multicast technologies that are relevant to security, and outline the basic security issues concerning multicast in general. Next we review some previous works done on source authentication with emphasis on TESLA, including its functionality, theory and drawbacks. And then describes Double Key-Chain TESLA, one major enhancement on TESLA, which uses double key chain instead of single key chain when authenticating data in detail including the packet structure design and the implementation of prototype out of three improvements made on TESLA. Lastly we discuss the implementation and enhanced design of Double Key-Chain TESLA as well as some further improvements.