A Hybrid Signature Scheme for Multicast Source Authentication
draft-irtf-smug-hybrid-src-auth-00

Abstract

This draft describes a compact and fast hybrid signature scheme that can be used to solve the problem of packet source authentication for multicast. The scheme can be viewed as an improvement to off-line/on-line signature schemes, in that the signature size overhead is much smaller although still significant. This scheme offers several advantages over other schemes for multicast source authentication. Firstly, the scheme provides the same security guarantees as regular public key signatures, but the signature computation is an order of magnitude faster. Secondly, this scheme permits each individual packet to be signed independently and efficiently, thus avoiding sender side latency found in schemes which need to spread a signature computation over several outgoing packets in order to achieve efficiency. This makes the scheme suitable in highly interactive settings where latency is an issue. This feature also make the scheme useful in settings where several different signatures need to be computed for by a single server machine for several different, low rate flows. Thirdly, this is an off-line/on-line scheme where most of the computational load is in the off-line stage, thus the scheme is ideally suited to situations where the signer machine has very irregular load. Finally, the scheme produces fixed sized authentication information (or signatures) so that applications know a-priori the authentication overhead.

Authors

Pankaj Rohatgi

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