Group management strategies for secure multicasting on active virtual private networks

Security is a crucial aspect in multicasting, the lack of which is currently preventing the large-scale deployment of group-oriented applications. Traditional IP multicast does not provide a secure framework for authentication, integrity and privacy for multicast sessions. This paper presents results of an ongoing subproject within the Secure Active VPN Environment (SAVE) project in active networks at Dalhousie University. Our subproject focuses on building a novel architecture for secure multicasting on virtual private networks (VPNs) using the concept of active networking. In any secure multicasting environment, group management becomes an important aspect for achieving privacy and integrity of the multicast session. In this paper, we propose group management strategies to address these objectives. Our approach combines cryptographic and active network techniques to provide a more powerful and flexible control for managing multicast groups.