Authenticast: a source authentication protocol for multicast flows and streams

The lack of security obstructs a large scale deployment of the multicast communication model. Therefore, a host of research works have been achieved in order to deal with several issues relating to securing the multicast, such as confidentiality, authentication, non-repudiation, integrity and access control. Many applications require authenticating the source of the received traffic, such as broadcasting stock quotes and videoconferencing and hence source authentication is a required component in the whole multicast security architecture. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient source authentication protocol which guarantees non-repudiation for multicast flows, and tolerates packet loss. We have simulated our protocol using NS-2, and the simulation results show that the protocol allows to achieve improvements over protocols fitting into the same category.