Secure Multicast Services and Applications

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Most Internet applications are based upon the client-server paradigm and make use of unicast delivery of data sent as independent packets. The technical issues of securing unicast communications for client-server computing is fairly well understood. However, many emerging Internet applications are based upon a group communications model. In particular, they require packet delivery from one or more authorized senders to a large number of authorized receivers. Furthermore, the data of many of these applications should be viewed as flows rather than as independent packets. Conceptually, since every point-to-multipoint communication can be represented as a set of point-to-point communications, and every flow can be treated as a sequence of individual packets, the current technology base for securing unicast packets can be extended in a straightforward manner to securing applications that employ flows and multicasts. Such extensions, however, would be highly inefficient. They will not be applicable to high-speed transmission and delay-sensitive flows, nor scalable to large groups.The objectives of this proposal are to investigate architectures and protocols for securing multicast and flow applications with emphasis on efficiency, latency, and scalability. The researchers have obtained some preliminary results on scalable group key management and efficient digital signatures. These are essential ingredients for designing and implementing secure multicast services. However, to design a scalable service for secure multicast on the Internet, even with just best-effort delivery, several research issues remain, namely, performance comparison of alternative architectures, efficient and reliable delivery of rekey messages (and their impact on a wide area network), and deployment of trusted components and active agents.The researchers next propose to investigate the more difficult problem of reliable secure multicast. For the Internet, this problem has been largely unexplored. Initially, they plan to approach this problem from two directions, namely, (i) how to make reliable multicast secure, and (ii) how to make secure multicast reliable. In addressing this problem, our concerns are, first, correctness, and second, performance issues such as latency and scalability.There are many applications that can benefit from techniques and services for securing flows and multicasts, e.g., teleconference, pay per view, information services, virtual private networks, collaborative work, software distribution, etc. The researchers propose to experiment with some of these applications. In particular, they propose to investigate a less obvious application, namely, active networks, which raises some interesting research issues. Securing active networks is an important problem with many different concerns, some of which are being addressed by other researchers. In the proposed project, the researchers are primarily concerned with characterizing the authenticity and confidentiality requirements of mobile code distribution in active networks and ensuring their satisfaction using efficient methods.