The Integration of TESLA and FLUTE over Satellite Networks

Researches on multicast has explored security challenges faced by group communications. Multicast transport protocols and multicast security protocols need to work closely to provide reliable and secure multicast services. However, there has been comparatively little work carried out to specify how exactly the two technologies can work together efficiently. In this paper, authors present an example of partially integrating the Timed Efficient Stream Loss-Tolerant Authentication (TESLA) protocol and the File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport (FLUTE) protocol. TESLA provides source authorization and data integrity for multicast groups while FLUTE ensures reliability of the multicast transmission. This paper proposes a loose synchronization mechanism for a unidirectional transmission environment, suited to satellite networks. The proposed algorithm was implemented on a testbed with multicast tunnel between University of Surrey and University of Aberdeen and the results are presented in this paper.