An Efficient Source Authentication for Multicast Based on Merkle Hash Tree

Source authentication is necessary in many multicast applications, especially in the real-time applications such as stream-video and online-news. In these applications, we should assure that all the packets received are from the same legal source and this can be done efficiently. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme to decrease both communication cost and computation cost of source authentication. Owing to packets may arrive in an irregular sequence, so we consider checking its real order of content. After all, there are some analyses about comparing the efficiency and costs with other researches.