Iolus

Suvo Mittra
1997 Computer communication review  
As multicast applications are deployed for mainstream use, the need to secure multicast communications will become critical. Multicast, however, does not t the point-to-point model of most network security protocols which w ere designed with unicast communications in mind. As we w ill show, securing multicast (or group) communications is fundamentally dierent f rom securing unicast (or paired) communications. In turn, these dierences can result in scalability problems for many t ypical
more » ... ons. In this paper, we examine and model the dierences between unicast and multicast security and then propose Iolus: a novel framework for scalable secure multicasting. Protocols based on Iolus can be used to achieve a v ariety o f s ecurity objectives and may be used either to directly secure multicast communications or to provide a separate group key management service to other \security-aware" applications. We describe the architecture and operation of Iolus in detail and also describe our experience with a protocol based on the Iolus framework.
doi:10.1145/263109.263179 fatcat:emhxm4gbavasrd64lcodpw2fqa