Iolus: A Framework for Scalable Secure Multicasting

As multicast applications are deployed for mainstream use, the need to secure multicast communications will become critical. Multicast, however, does not t the point-to-point model of most network security protocols which were designed with unicast communications in mind. As we will show, securing multicast (or group) communications is fundamentally dierent from securing unicast (or paired) communications. In turn, these dierences can result in scalability problems for many typical applications. In this paper, we examine and model the dierences between unicast and multicast security and then propose Iolus: a novel framework for scalable secure multicasting. Protocols based on Iolus can be used to achieve a variety of security objectives and may be used either to directly secure multicast communications or to provide a separate group key management service to other \security-aware" applications. We describe the architecture and operation of Iolus in detail and also describe ou...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Suvo Mittra
• Keywords: Communications, Multicast, Multicast Communications, Secure Multicast, SIGCOMM 1997