Multicast authentication in fully adversarial networks

Abstract

We study a general version of the multicast authentication problem where the underlying network, controlled by an adversary, may drop chosen packets, rearrange the order of the packets in an arbitrary way, and inject new packets into the transmitted stream. Prior work on the problem has focused on less general models, where random, rather than adversarially-selected packets may be dropped and altered, or no additional packets may be injected into the stream. We describe an efficient and scalable authentication scheme that is based on a novel combination of error-correcting codes with standard cryptographic primitives. We prove the security of our scheme and analyze its performance in terms of the computational effort at the sender and receiver and the communication overhead. We also discuss specific design and implementation choices and compare our scheme with previously proposed approaches.