Design and implementation of secure multicast based on SDN

Multicast communication is an important requirement for many types of applications such as IPTV, video conference. In current IP multicast architecture, any host can join a multicast group without authentication because no host identification information is maintained by routers, which leads to security risks. In addition, the routers need to be involved in both forwarding packets and maintaining route states, which results in massive complexity of the devices and produces a lot of control overheads. This paper proposes a multicast clean-slate scheme based on Software-defined Networking (SDN), aiming to improve security and controllability of multicast networks. A multicast controller logically centralized is designed to be responsible for handling multicast events, calculating multicast tree and authentication the identity of host. A prototype is implemented in our SDN platform. The result proves that our scheme is superior to the traditional IP multicast, which is reflected in two aspects: firstly, the illegal users are prevented from joining multicast group effectively. Secondly, the delay of joining a group is less than the traditional IP multicast.