New Real Time Multicast Authentication Protocol

Multicast gives professional large-scale content distribution byproviding an efficient transport mechanism for one-to-many andmany-to-many communications. There is a number of security issuesin multicast communication directly related to the specific natureof multicast. In our paper, we concentrate on the multicastauthentication problem. There are four important requirements of multicastcommunication protocols: to perform authentication inreal-time, to resist packet loss and pollution attacks, to havelow communication and computation overheads, and to haveresistance to replay attacks. In this paper, a protocolfor authenticating multicast data applications is proposed. Inorder to provide authentication, the proposed protocol uses bothpublic key signature and symmetric key encryption. The proposedprotocol resists packet loss by using erasure code functions overthe signature. To resist pollution attacks, our protocol computesthe symmetric encryption of the erasure code output. To resistreplay attacks, a counter number is added to each packet. Theproposed protocol is compared to other multicast authenticationprotocols. The comparison shows that the proposed protocol has lowcomputation and communication overheads. The proposed protocolcalled Latif-Aslan-Ramly1 (LAR1) is analyzed using Burrows, Abadiand Needham (BAN) logic. The analysis shows that it achieves theauthentication goals without bugs or redundancies.