An Authentication Scheme for Multicast Networks

Abstract

Most of the prior works on formulating authentication schemes for multicast networks focus on less general models, where random, rather than adversarially selected, packets may be dropped and altered. Most of them don't tolerate new packet injections. In this paper an efficient secure reliable robust scheme is proposed and implementation results are presented. This scheme is based on a novel combination of error correcting codes with standard cryptographic primitives. A general network model is proposed where an adversary can perform various attacks on the transmitted streams. In this model, two parameters of the network, the survival rate and the flood rate, characterize the power of the adversary. This paper implement the authentication scheme in a generic manner so that the various network parameters, namely the survival rate, flood rate, decoder tolerance rate can be tuned to achieve better performance in terms of communication overhead and computation costs