Naganand Doraswamy

An Architecture for Conference-Support Using Secured Multicast

The current work argues that from a security perspective there is much to be gained by employing a “secured” IP multicast at the Network layer to support the formation and management of secure conferences at the Application layer. A secured IP multicast -- with group authentication and confidentiality -- already achieves a reasonable level of security, and therefore fulfils a large part of the basic requirements of secure conferencing. If host-to-host authentication and confidentiality has been achieved through an N-to-N multicast that has been secured, then to a large extent the basic security needs of conferencing has been satisfied. What remains would be for the other conference-specific security requirements to be satisfied using methods which are particular to a given conference scheme, such as cheater detection/identification methods based on cryptographic techniques. In the current work we propose an architecture called the Multicast/Conference Security Architecture (MCSA) to facilitate the use of (a secured) IP multicast at the Network layer for establishing (a secured) conference at the Application layer.