Security Issues and Solutions in Multicast Content Distribution : A Survey

ulticast enables efficient large-scale content distribution by providing an efficient transport mechanism for one-to-many and many-to-many communication. Over the years, multi-cast has been the topic of many research, engineering, and deployment efforts. These efforts have continued to transform multicast into a technology that can be relied on by many applications. Work has been done in reliability, manageability, scalability, quality of service, and ease of deployment. As these areas become more mature, there is increased potential for multicast to be used as the underlying distribution mechanism for content distribution applications. Therefore, security in multicast content distribution is a concern. The maturity of multicast security solutions have the potential to enable the use of multicast for confidential and high-value content, and help spark the use of multicast by new applications. There are a number of security issues in multicast content distribution directly related to the properties of multicast that make it efficient and attractive. There has been research that provides solutions to many of these security issues. Some of these solutions are ready for deployment, some are nearing maturity, and others are only in the early phases of research. The maturity and deployment of these solutions will help increase the ability of multicast technology to deliver new applications and more content. In this article we examine these various issues and solutions for providing secure multicast content distribution, and outline several future research directions. The definition of the host group model [1] provides a summary of the key properties of multicast: " a host group is a set of network entities sharing a common identifying multicast address, all receiving any data packets addressed to this multi-cast address by senders (sources) that may or may not be members of the same group and have no knowledge of the groups' membership. " This definition highlights the three main properties of multicast: • All members receive all packets sent to the address: Multi-cast routing delivers all packets sent to the multicast address to all members of the multicast group. • Open group membership: Multicast provides an open group model and allows group membership to be transparent to the source. • Open access to send packets to the group: Any host can send data to the multicast address, and it will be delivered to the multicast group without regard for the source of these packets. We note that we focus here on the host-group native-IP multicast model, …