DEVELOPMENT OF MULTICAST PACKET AUTHENTICATION SYSTEM USING SIGNATURE AMORTIZATION

Abstract

The problem of authenticating multicast packets has received different attention over the years. The main challenge have been on the high computation overhead incurred in signing multicast streams and the difficulty of authentication when there is one or more packet losses. Signature amortization handles this problem, reducing the size of communication overhead needed to authenticate packets by signing a single signature over a block of packets. In this project, Information Dispersal Algorithm was used to construct the hash of each packets, and the hash values of the individual packets were concatenated and amortized over multiple packets. This was used to design multicast message authentication scheme based on the technique of signature amortization. This authenticates packets with a major objective of reducing the computation overhead and ensuring verification when there is packet loss. The simulation model was developed using C Sharp programming language as a front end using Mysql database as the backend. The program was simulated in an environment where a number of messages or packets were sent to a chosen number of receivers with probabilities of loss calculated for each transmission. The performance was compared with three other previous schemes to ascertain that the probability of verification is much higher without introducing delay. It was observed that with the same amount of communication overhead when compared with other authentication schemes, this scheme achieved the highest verification probability. In conclusion, the program is very efficient in authenticating packets in a lossy environment especially with reduced space overhead.