In the view of the constantly expanding Internet, more applications make use of the Internet every day. Internet telephony, video conferencing, up-to-date stock quotes, etc. just to mention a few. Extending an application to make use of the Internet may greatly increase the functionality but on the other hand security and privacy issues arise. Anybody on the planet might interfere or cause problems.
Since security is a difficult problem to solve, new Internet applications or protocols postpone security issues until later versions. The same observation applies to multicast - the first implementations did not address security. We believe that security is important and a necessary component for many serious applications. Therefore we feel that adding security and privacy capabilities to multicast of high importance.
In this report we describe the SMIF framework, an environment that supplies a system designer with building blocks that let him realize a wide variety of different security requirements. In addition the designer also has a simpler task as he does not need to be familiar with security subtleties. This approach leads to a more complicated environment than a simple off-the-shelf solution. Because there is no easy method that solves all combinations of security requirements optimally our approach is the right way to go.