XML policy representation for secure multicast

With the wide range of communication devices being used there is a definite requirement to be able to specify security policies depending upon the context of usage, in a manner which can be easily interpreted by various devices and easily visualized by network administrators. Multicast is largely being accepted as the delivery mechanism for delivering high bandwidth content to a large number of receivers. The MSEC group within IETF has been working to develop a secure multicast framework. Their work includes the development of multicast policy architecture for interpreting, translating and representing policies. This paper shows how XML can be used for representing multicast policies. With the wide range of tools available for XML and cross-platform advantages offered by XML, it is the natural choice for policy representation. The paper also identifies various important multicast policies.