Multicast gives professional large-scale content distribution by providing an efficient transport mechanism for one-to-many and many-to-many communications. There is a number of security issues in multicast communication directly related to the specific nature of multicast. In our paper, we concentrate on the multicast authentication problem. There are four important requirements of multicast communication protocols: to perform authentication in real-time, to resist packet loss and pollution

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... acks, to have low communication and computation overheads, and to have resistance to replay attacks. In this paper, a protocol for authenticating multicast data applications is proposed. In order to provide authentication, the proposed protocol uses both public key signature and symmetric key encryption. The proposed protocol resists packet loss by using erasure code functions over the signature. To resist pollution attacks, our protocol computes the symmetric encryption of the erasure code output. To resist replay attacks, a counter number is added to each packet. The proposed protocol is compared to other multicast authentication protocols. The comparison shows that the proposed protocol has low computation and communication overheads. The proposed protocol called Latif-Aslan-Ramly1 (LAR1) is analyzed using Burrows, Abadi and Needham (BAN) logic. The analysis shows that it achieves the authentication goals without bugs or redundancies.