A loss resilient and scalable streaming media authentication scheme

Authentication is a primary component for secure delivery of multimedia content in many consumer networking applications: to guarantee the integrity of the received data stream. Meanwhile, consumer networks increasingly used for multimedia information and commercial content delivery, are destined to be heterogeneous. To provide QoS, it is necessary to adapt the multimedia stream to the heterogeneous network channel conditions and device capabilities. This new adaptation requirement, together with the 'best effort' and 'error prone' characteristics of IP and wireless networks, and the 'real time playback' property of streaming media impose challenges in the design of the streaming media authentication schemes. Conventional message authentication schemes do not offer suitable scalability or loss resilient capability for this new set of applications. A suitable authentication scheme must allow the recipient to authenticate the received data faster than the packet receiving rate, with means to adapt to channel conditions and device capability, despite any losses or transmission errors. In this paper we study the design of loss resilient scalable media stream authentication and present a scheme that is scalable and loss resilient.