Collusion-resistant message authentication in overlay multicast communication

Abstract

This paper aims at providing message authentication service in overlay multicast. Previous work has mostly focused on the network layer IP multicast and not as much work has been done on the application layer overlay multicast. A main feature of overlay multicast is that end systems carry on the responsibility of delivering the multicast traffic. Taking adVantage of this feature, this paper presents a new collusion resistant technique, which is based on digital signature, for overlay multicast message authentication. The proposed technique minimizes both the computational cost (through signature amortization) and the communication overhead (using retransmissions and utilizing multiple multicast groups in handling message loss). In addition, it resists denial of service attacks via early dropping of forged messages. A simulation study is conducted to evaluate our proposed technique. Results of the study show that the proposed technique outperforms earlier ones. ©Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.