Title: Scalable Multicast Key Distribution
Author(s): A. Ballardie.
Status: EXPERIMENTAL
Date: May 1996
Length: 41853
The benefits of multicasting are becoming ever-more apparent, and its use much more widespread. This is evident from the growth of the MBONE [1]. Providing security services for multicast, such as traffic integrity, authentication, and confidentiality, is particularly problematic since it requires securely distributing a group (session) key to each of a group's receivers. Traditionally, the key distribution function has been assigned to a central network entity, or Key Distribution Centre (KDC), but this method does not scale for wide-area multicasting, where group members may be widely-distributed across the internetwork, and a wide-area group may be densely populated.
Even more problematic is the scalable distribution of sender-specific keys. Sender-specific keys are required if data traffic is to be authenticated on a per-sender basis.
This memo provides a scalable solution to the multicast key distribution problem.
NOTE: this proposal requires some simple support mechanisms, which, it is recommended here, be integrated into version 3 of IGMP. This support is described in Appendix B.
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