A Survey of Secure B2C Commerce for Multicast Services

Services such as audio/video streaming, advertising, and software distribution can be delivered much more efficiently by network service providers if multicast data distribution is used. However, accounting for the resources consumed by subscribers becomes essential. Using an e-commerce (payment recovery) operational environment, in turn, requires support for security properties such as authentication, authorization, data confidentiality, and non-repudiation. However, multicast data distribution is inherently more susceptible to attack than unicast distribution, given its greater susceptibility to interception of the network traffic. Securing multicast sessions in B2C commerce requires authentication of the end-host, authorization of the subscriber and his e-payments, and accounting for a subscriber´s consumed resources. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the literature on e-payment platforms and protocols that provide some form of security to e-commerce transactions, followed by a comparative study of these e-payment platforms and protocols. We show the security problems that are currently unaddressed by the existing multicast protocols and e-payment platforms and protocols, in securing the operating environment of B2C commerce for multicast networks