A Robust Multicast Authentication Scheme Based on Asymmetric Key Signature

Multicast packets authentication major challenges are high computation overhead incurred while signing multicast streams and authentication difficulty when there is one or more packet losses. In this paper, Information Dispersal Algorithm was used to construct the hash of each packet with the hash values of individual packets concatenated over multiple packets. Authentication scheme for Multicast message packets design was based on signature amortization technique. This reduces the computation overhead and ensures verification when there is packet loss. The design was simulated with a number of messages sent to a chosen number of receivers. Probabilities of loss were calculated for each transmission. The performance was compared with three other existing schemes to ascertain its efficiency. It was observed that our technique is efficient in packets authentication in a lossy environment especially with reduced space overhead.