Critical multicast

While the importance of protecting the confidentiality of sensitive cybernetic communications is widely recognized, the importance of ensuring the trustworthiness of information that is public yet critical is perhaps less obvious. Critical non-confidential messages must be issued by a trusted authoritative source in order to serve as the basis for operational decisions, but while existing authentication mechanisms can guard against tampering with the messages from such a source they cannot defend against compromise of the source itself. A public key infrastructure developed for Delay-Tolerant Networking addresses this problem. Its design might serve as the basis for a general “Critical Multicast” technology, ensuring that vital yet non-confidential information received via the network is genuine.