Secure Multi Cast Transmission

Multicast networking support is becoming an increasingly important future technology area for both commercial and military distributed and group-based applications. Integrating a multicast security solution involves numerous engineering tradeoffs. The end goal of effective operational performance and scalability over a heterogeneous internetwork is of primary interest for wide scale adoption and application of such a capability. Various techniques that have been proposed to support multicast security are discussed and their relative merits are explored. A common simple criterion was established that can be used to evaluate multicast keying architectures. The criteria focus on the efficiency and scalability of the keying solution. Using these criteria, several keying architectures are evaluated and compared to determine their strengths and weaknesses.