Title: Efficient multicast stream authentication for the fully adversarial network model

Authors: Christophe Tartary, Huaxiong Wang

Addresses: Department of Computing, Centre for Advanced Computing, Algorithms and Cryptography, Macquarie University, Sydney NSW 2109, Australia. ' Division of Mathematical Sciences, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Abstract: We consider the stream authentication problem when an adversary has the ability to drop, reorder or inject data in the network. We propose a coding approach for multicast stream authentication using the list-decoding property of Reed-Solomon codes. We divide the data to be authenticated into a stream of packets and associate a single trapdoor hash collision for every λn packets where λ and n are predesignated parameters. Our scheme, which is also joinable at the boundary of any n-packet block, can be viewed as an extension of Lysyanskaya, Tamassia and Triandopoulos|s technique in which λ = 1. We show that by choosing λ and n appropriately, our scheme outperforms theirs in time spent for processing data at the sender and receiver. Our approach relies on the dispersion process as SAIDA and eSAIDA. Assuming that we use RSA for signing and SHA-256 for hashing, we give an approximation of the proportion of extra packets per block which could be processed via our technique with respect to the previous scheme. As example when we process λ = 1000 blocks of 2650 64-byte-packets, the gain of our scheme with respect to Lysyanskaya et al.|s is about 30%.

Keywords: multicast stream authentication; signature dispersion; Reed-Solomon codes; trapdoor hash function; THF; adversarial network models; security; networks; cryptography.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2007.013172

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2007 Vol.2 No.3/4, pp.175 - 191

Published online: 11 Apr 2007 *

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