Security Analysis of DTLS Structure and Its Application to Secure Multicast Communication

Transport Layer Security (TLS) provides reliable and in-order communication. However due to its retransmission behavior it causes delay that is inappropriate for real time applications. Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) can be used as an efficient alternate for securing the real time communication because of its unreliable and out of order features. Real-time secure multicast communication is an effective technique which mainly focuses on ´key distribution´, ´forward and backward security´, ´participant´s authentication´ and scalability. An extensive research is available for providing security to peer-to-peer (P2P) application using DTLS. However, no specific efforts have been made regarding its use for securing multicast communication. This paper not only reviews the structure of DTLS protocol in terms of security but also proposes a secure reliable multicast scheme using DTLS.