Efficient security mechanism for broadcasting over IMS networks

The Third Generation Partnership Project(3GPP) forum [1] has specified IMS (Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem) which provides resource, admission and charging control [2] for multimedia services. The OMA (The Open Mobile Alliance) forum [3] has specified BCAST (Mobile Broadcast Services) [4] which is network agnostic service enabler for mobile broadcast service. Up to now, IMS and BCAST are separated subsystems sharing no common interfaces in order to utilize each other. In this paper we focus on converging the IMS and the BCAST systems to support the next generation broadcast and multicast services like IPTV and to avoid inconsistency with different registration and authentication solutions provided in various forums. Our aim is to enable the deployment of BCAST service as an IMS service and specify the ways by which the security functionalities of BCAST service can be adopted and optimized. The proposed methods optimize the registration and establishment of security association procedure in the IMS system controlled BCAST services. The proposed authentication scheme efficiently reduces the number of message exchanges for registration and also reduces the consumption of AKA authentication vectors.