Efficient Multicast Packet Authentication Using Signature Amortization

We describe a novel method for authenticating multicast packets that is robust against packet loss. Our main focus is to minimize the size of the communication overhead required to authenticate the packets. Our approach is to encode the hash values and the signatures with Rabin’s Information Dispersal Algorithm (IDA) to construct an authentication scheme that amortizes a single signature operation over multiple packets. This strategy is especially efficient in terms of space overhead, because just the essential elements needed for authentication (i.e., one hash per packet and one signature per group of packets) are used in conjunction with an erasure code that is space optimal. To evaluate the performance of our scheme, we compare our technique with four other previously proposed schemes using analytical and empirical results. Two different bursty loss models are considered in the analyses.