A Reliable Real-time Multicast Authentication Protocol with Provable Accuracy

Abstract

With the rapid development of network technologies and the continuing growth of the online population, the distribution of streamed media on the Internet has become a cause for concern. In order to securely deliver large-scale message streams, various multicast authentication protocols have been proposed. Recently, Abdellatif et al. proposed a real-time multicast authentication protocol called LAR1. The LAR1 protocol has low computation and communication overheads and uses the erasure code function to deal with the packet loss problem. However, through careful analyses, we find that their scheme cannot resist impersonation attacks on signers and only partially solves the packet loss problem. Moreover, there are still some design weaknesses. Then, we propose a more secure multicast authentication protocol, called IMA, with almost the same computation overheads and lower communication overheads. We adopt the BAN logic to demonstrate the authentication accuracy of our proposed scheme. Comparisons of other related works show that our proposed IMA protocol maintains efficiency and is more secure. Therefore, our proposed protocol is more suitable for practical applications.