Establishing a secure multicast group for remote software delivery

The development of IP multicast provides an efficient way for data distribution. Applying this technique to delivering software remotely can save a lot of money. Thus, there is a high demand for such a new service that uses multicast to distribute software securely and reliably. Usually, two phases exist in software delivery, group establishment and data transfer. We focus on the multicast group establishment phase. We introduce an agent-based group management system. This system is responsible for authentication and authorization to establish a secure group which demands that only authorized recipients should join the transmission group. The paper presents an overview of the system and describes an interface to end-users.