An Optimal Message Authentication Scheme for Lossy Channels

This paper presents an optimal chaining technique for message authentication in lossy environments such as MANets. The scheme is similar in topology to star chaining but is more economic in terms of transmission and computational overhead. The overhead is independent of group size and it enables individual packet verification, so it is ideal for selective multicast transmission, video and audio streaming. The generality of the scheme makes it suitable for many scenarios. A security vulnerability of the proposed scheme has been identified that limits the usefulness of this scheme in certain scenarios. Furthermore, we have pointed out a conceptual mistake by Sato et. al. in constructing a comparison table (F. Sato, et al., 2005)