Dynamically negotiated security service for multicast application in the active network

Many cryptography and integrity algorithms have been suggested to enhance the security of active networks. Since senders and receivers of multicast applications may own different security processing capabilities and use different security services to communicate with each other, different security services must be negotiated among these receivers and senders before communication is implemented in the active network. However, this problem may not be validly solved by using general session protocols, key distributed and general multicast security mechanisms, because the premise of general security mechanisms presumes that senders and receivers of multicast applications all use the same security algorithms (i.e. the same security service). To address this problem, the paper proposes a novel mechanism to provide the needed mechanism of quality of security service and dynamically negotiated quality of security service for the senders and receivers of multicast application in the active network. It also provides different quality of security service resolutions for different receivers with different security service needs and includes six different negotiation styles.