A New Direction For Research On Data Origin Authentication In Group Communication

Group communication facilitates efficient data transmission to numerous receivers by reducing data replication efforts both at the sender and in the network. Group communication is used in today's communication networks in many ways, such as broadcasting in cellular networks, IP multicast on the network layer, or as application layer multicast. Despite many efforts in providing data origin authentication for specific application areas in group communication, no efficient and secure all-purpose solution has been proposed so far.In this paper, we analyze data origin authentication schemes from 25 years of research. We distinguish three general approaches to address the challenge and assign six conceptually different classes to these three approaches. We show that each class comprises trade-offs from a specific point of view that prevent the class from being generally applicable to group communication. We then propose to add a new class of schemes based on recent high-performance digital signatures. We argue that the high-speed signing approach is secure, resource efficient, and can be applied with acceptable communication overhead. This new class therefore provides a solution that is generally applicable and should be the foundation of future research on data origin authentication for group communication.