Lakshminath Dondeti

A dual encryption protocol for scalable secure multicasting

We propose a dual encryption protocol for scalable secure multicasting. Multicasting is a scalable solution for group communication. It however poses several unique security problems. We use hierarchical subgrouping to achieve scalability. Third-party hosts or members of the multicast group are designated as subgroup managers. They are responsible for secret key distribution and group membership management at the subgroup level. Unlike existing secure multicast protocols, our protocol need not trust the subgroup managers with the distribution of data encryption keys. The dual encryption protocol proposed in this paper distributes encrypted data encryption keys via subgroup managers. We also present a classification of the existing secure multicast protocols, compare their relative merits and show the advantages of our protocol.

DISEC: a distributed framework for scalable secure many-to-many communication

Secure one-to-many multicasting has been a popular research area in the past. Secure many-to-many multicasting is becoming popular with applications such as private conferencing and distributed interactive simulation. Most of the existing secure multicasting protocols use a centralized group manager to enforce access control and for key distribution. In the presence of multiple senders it is desirable to delegate group management responsibility to all the senders. We propose a distributed group key management scheme to support secure many-to-many communication. We divide key distribution overhead evenly among the senders. Our protocol is scalable and places equal trust in all the senders.

MBA: a tool for multicast billing and accounting

IP multicast deployment has been slow due to several factors. One of the important reasons is a lack of support for debugging, accounting and billing services for multicast protocols. We propose a common framework that can be used to provide multiple multicast services efficiently. The framework collects information such as multicast router status, flow statistics and stores them in a database. The data could be used for debugging, traffic engineering, accounting and billing. We illustrate the use of the framework for accounting and billing. We describe a prototype implementation of our approach. Our contributions include a protocol independent tree discovery mechanism and an efficient algorithm for per-receiver accounting.