Techniques and Issues in Multicast Security

Multicast networking support is becoming an increasingly important future technology area for both commercial and military distributed and group-based applications. Integrating a multicast security solution involves numerous engineering tradeoffs. The end goal of effective operational performance and scalability over a heterogeneous internetwork is of primary interest for widescale adoption and application of such a capability. Various techniques that have been proposed to support multicast security are discussed and their relative merits are explored. The original document contains color images.