Efficient object-based stream authentication

This paper presents an object-based stream authentication scheme for practical end-to-end applications on present network infrastructure and protocols. In this proposal, a stream is divided into objects that are delivered sequentially. Each object consists of a unique identifier, content and operations. At the sender side, a locked object identifier is produced by encrypting the object identifier with a key generated from MAC of the object content. The object content and locked identifier are transmitted to the receiver. The receiver can recover the object identifier and check it to authenticate the object. The scheme tolerates packet loss, and incurs no additional overhead if an identifier is ingeniously chosen. In the experiment, we overload some particular fields in the headers of standard protocols as object identifier to implement a real time video stream authentication scheme.