The recent growth of multimedia group applications coupled with advancement in high-speed networking are driving the need for efficient multicast communication protocols over the Internet. Examples of such applications include teleconferencing, distance education, and shared workspace. These applications require QoS assurance and secure communication services. The issue of QoS assurance has been an active research for many years and the issue of secure multicast communication has been receiving significant research attention in recent years.
The objectives of a secure multicast communication are simple: "preserve authenticity and secrecy of the data so that only registered senders can send packets to the group and only registered receivers can receive packets sent to the group". Due to the lack of network-level access control in the Internet, enforcing message secrecy for group communication requires encryption. This requires a group key management solution to distribute and maintain cryptographic keys with registered group members. Similarly, cryptographic authentication schemes are necessary to ensure that registered receivers can verify that received packets come from registered senders. In this talk, we discuss the trends in secure multicast communication focusing on group key management and packet source authentication.