AuthoCast : a mobility-compliant protocol framework for multicast sender authentication

Abstract

Mobility is considered a key technology of the next generation Internet and has been standardized within the IETF. Rapidly emerging multimedia group applications such as IPTV, MMORPGs and video conferencing increase the demand for mobile group communication, but a standard design of mobile multicast is still awaited. The open problem poses significant operational and security challenges to the Internet infrastructure. This paper introduces a protocol framework for authenticating multicast sources and securing their mobility handovers. Its contribution is twofold: At first, the current mobile multicast problem and solution spaces are summarized from the security perspective. At second, a solution to the mobile source authentication problem is presented that complies to IPv6 mobility signaling standards. Using an autonomously verifiable one-way authentication based on cryptographically generated addresses, a common design is derived to jointly comply with the mobile any source and source specific multicast protocols that are currently proposed. This light-weight scheme smoothly extends the unicast enhanced route optimization for mobile IPv6 and adds only little overhead to multicast packets and protocol operations.