Speaker: George Pantazis
Day:  Wednesday, 10/18/2006
Room: ITEB 201
Time: 2:30pm

Title: Security for Multicast Communication

Abstract.
Multicast communication is becoming the basis for a growing number of applications. It is therefore critical to provide security mechanisms for multicast communication. A taxonomy of multicast scenarios will be presented and point out relevant security concerns. Next, two major security problems of multicast communication will be discussed: Source Authentication and Key Revocation.  Maintaining authenticity in multicast protocols is a much more complex problem than for unicast; in particular, known solutions are prohibitively inefficient in many cases. A solution is presented that is reasonable for a range of scenarios and it can be considered as a midpoint between traditional Message Authentication Codes and digital signatures. Finally, an improved solution to the key revocation problem will be discussed every time a user leaves a group.