Distributed group access control architecture for secure multicast

Multicast technology has become significant due to its support for collaborative applications such as distance learning, multiparty conferencing etc. Commercial deployment of multicast is hindered due to its security vulnerabilities such as denial of service, theft of service, masquerading and eavesdropping. The proposed group access control architecture is overlaid on a distributed routing scheme, which reduces the rekeying frequency through a distributed approach. Three major modules developed for this distributed group access control architecture are the group access control system, the group policy management system and group key management. The core of the architecture namely, the group access control system obtains a mutual support from group policy and group key management systems. Analysis is done, by observing the message and computational overhead due to the implementation of this architecture.