Flex-CC: A flexible connected chains scheme for multicast source authentication in dynamic SDN environment

Multicast service has the advantage of saving the resources of senders. It ensures the efficiency of the network by lowering network share, but it is necessary to address security issues. Source authentication is one of the basic requirements for multicast applications such as distribution data of stock quotes, video-streaming, online news, IPTV, etc. Despite many efforts in providing source authentication for multicast applications, no efficient multicast source authentication mechanism that can deal with the requirements of dynamic environments has been proposed. In this paper, we analyze source authentication mechanisms with non-repudiation from 20 years of research. Most of them do not provide an efficient mechanism that takes into account the fact that users and networks are dynamic. Taking advantage of the centralized view of the control plane and the contextual data from the data plane in Software Defined Network (SDN), we propose a new flexible multicast source authentication scheme called Flexible Connected Chains (Flex-CC). It is an efficient mechanism that can deal with the requirements of dynamic environments, ensures non-repudiation, and tolerates packet loss. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism works efficiently in resource utilization with reduced communication and delay overhead in a dynamic scenario.