Secure Multicast using IPSec and Multi-party Key Computation

Abstract

In recent times, the demand for multicast communications is increasing, both from internet service providers and from the content, media providers or distributors. One of the main obstacles to the wider commercial deployment of internet protocol (IP) multicast is the lack of security for the content being transmitted through IP multicast and communication infrastructure underlying IP multicast. This paper presents a multi-party key computation (MKC) protocol which provides added security to IP multicast. The group key computation, in our protocol, involves multi-party computations using one-time pad and a secret sharing scheme. The proposed protocol is secure, efficient and compatible with IPSec.