Secure and accountable multicast data distribution

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Although multicast data communication has potential for substantially reducing network resource requirements when used to distribute identical data to many participants, and although it has been used in specific, controlled environments, it has not been offered as a general service by Internet Service Providers, since the necessary security and accounting functionality is not available. Solving this problem requires an integrated approach, with attention paid to Security and AAA (Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting) in the entire protocol stack.  During the previous grant period, the overall architecture has been formulated, and solutions proposed for the following areas: key management, router-to-router security, router-to-host security, router-to-AAA server communication, interaction with financial representatives (e-commerce interaction), host and user identification. During the coming grant period, there will be three main areas of activity: 1) Integration of the key management solution into an existing extensible router (XORP); 2) Design and validation of the necessary extensions to the AAA and host-to-router protocols to facilitate the accurate control and monitoring of multicast services, and their integration into the XORP platform. 3) Design and validation of a framework for support of the tree management for a range of reliable and unreliable multicast data distribution protocols, and the integration of the resulting protocols into the XORP platform. The long-term goal is the demonstration of the feasibility of a secure, accountable multicast data distribution system.  Achievement of this goal will permit the introduction of multicast data distribution in commercial systems, with direct benefits to the operators of such systems (lowered costs and increased revenue generation), and indirect benefits to the user communities, through lower costs and by enabling applications that would otherwise be infeasible.