MAC based Approaches for Multicast Source Authentication

With the explosive growth of the internet and growing demand for novel types of group communication, simultaneous transmission of digital information becomes prevalent model of communication. They have applications in TV over internet, video-conferencing, news feeds, stock quotes, online video games and software updates. Some of them need one to many communications while others need many to many communications. So in these applications authenticating members of multicast groups to verify that it is originated from authenticated source plays a significant role. A large number of protocols are proposed to support source authentication in multicasting. In this paper we classify the existing source authentication protocols and describe the MAC based protocols to verify the identity of sender.