Robustness to Inflated Subscription in Multicast Congestion Control

Group subscription is a useful mechanism for multicast congestion control: RLM, RLC, FLID-DL, and WEBRC form a promising line of multi-group protocols where receivers provide no feedback to the sender but control congestion via group membership regulation. Unfortunately, the group subscription mechanism also o#ers receivers an opportunity to elicit self-beneficial bandwidth allocations. In particular, a misbehaving receiver can ignore guidelines for group subscription and choose an unfairly high subscription level in a multi-group multicast session. This poses a serious threat to fairness of bandwidth allocation. In this paper, we present the first solution for the problem of inflated subscription. Our design guards access to multicast groups with dynamic keys and consists of two independent components: DELTA (Distribution of ELigibility To Access) -- a novel method for in-band distribution of group keys to receivers that are eligible to access the groups according to the congestion control protocol, and SIGMA (Secure Internet Group Management Architecture) -- a generic architecture for key-based group access at edge routers

Multicast Congestion Control with Distrusted Receivers

Congestion control protocols rely on receivers to support fair bandwidth sharing. However, a receiver has incentives to elicit self-bene cial bandwidth allocations and hence may manipulate its congestion control protocol. Whereas the issue of receiver misbehavior has been studied for unicast congestion control, the impact of receiver misbehavior in multicast remains unexplored. In this paper, we examine the problem of fair congestion control in distrusted multicast environments. We classify standard mechanisms for multicast congestion control and determine their potential vulnerabilities to receiver misbehavior. Our evaluation of prominent multicast protocols shows that each of them is susceptible to attacks by a misbehaving receiver

Robust Congestion Control for Multicast: Challenges And Opportunities

Trust is the foundation of most congestion control protocols developed and deployed in the Internet today. Unfortunately, with the growth of the Internet, the assumption of universal trust is no longer tenable. A communicating entity can misbehave to obtain a self-beneficial bandwidth allocation. Thus, design of congestion control protocols that are robust to such misbehavior has become an important research area. In this paper, we discuss the specific problem of designing robust congestion control for multicast in the presence of untrusted hosts. We examine IP and peer-to-peer instantiations of the multicast service. For both cases, we show that protection against host misbehavior is harder than in unicast and poses new research challenges. We outline possible solutions for designing robust multicast congestion control protocols. Further, we argue that intrinsically different design requirements imposed by untrusted environments point to the need for exploring an integrative alternative to the traditional layered network architecture

Design of Multicast Protocols Robust against Inflated Subscription

Abstract—To disseminate data to a heterogeneous body of receivers efficiently, congestion control protocols for IP multicast compose a session from several multicast groups and prescribe guidelines that enable each receiver to subscribe to an appropriate subset of the groups. However, a misbehaving receiver can ignore the group subscription rules and inflate its subscription to acquire unfairly high throughput. In this paper, we present the first solution for the problem of inflated subscription. Our design guards access to multicast groups with dynamic keys and consists of two independent components: DELTA (Distribution of ELigibility To Access)—a novel method for in-band distribution of group keys to receivers that are eligible to access the groups according to the congestion control protocol, and SIGMA (Secure Internet Group Management Architecture)—a generic architecture for key-based group access at edge routers. We apply DELTA and SIGMA to derive robust versions of prominent RLM and FLID-DL protocols. Index Terms—Congestion control, fair bandwidth allocation, misbehaving receivers, multicast, robust communication protocols. I

Lightweight Protection Against Inflated Subscription in Multicast Congestion Control

Group membership regulation is a useful mechanism for multicast congestion control: RLM, RLC, FLID-DL, and WEBRC form a promising line of multi-group protocols where receivers provide no feedback to the sender but control congestion via group subscription. Unfortunately, the group subscription mechanism also offers receivers an opportunity to elicit self-beneficial bandwidth allocations. In particular, a misbehaving receiver can ignore guidelines for group subscription and choose an unfairly high subscription level in a multi-group multicast session; this poses a serious threat to fairness of bandwidth allocation. In this paper, we present a lightweight solution for the problem of inflated subscription. Our design guards access to multicast groups with dynamic keys and consists of two independent components: DELTA (Distribution of ELigibility To Access) -- a novel method for in-band distribution of group keys to receivers that are eligible to access the groups according to the congestion control protocol, and SIGMA (Secure Internet Group Management Architecture) -- a generic architecture for key-based group access at edge routers. DELTA and SIGMA are the first to solve the problem of inflated subscription in multi-group protocols for multicast congestion control

Robustness of Multicast Congestion Control To Inflated Subscription

INTRODUCTION The Internet has grown from a small testbed shared by a close-knit community of researchers to a global commercial network with a huge number of users. The change in the scale requires revisiting original assumptions in the Internet design and checking whether they match the reality of today. One such assumption is trust. Conventional protocols for network bandwidth allocation assume that all communicating parties follow guidelines for fair bandwidth sharing. However, a selfish receiver has incentives to acquire data at an unfairly high rate. Furthermore, open-source operating systems create ample opportunities for receiver misbehavior. For example, Savage et al show that a misbehaving TCP receiver can increase its reliable throughput substantially at the expense of competing tra#c [6]. Thus, network research faces a new important challenge of robust bandwidth allocation in the presence of distrusted receivers [2]. Multicast is a service for scalable dissemination of da

Architecture and Design

The Internet has grown from a small testbed shared by a close-knit community of researchers to a global commercial network with a huge number of users. The change in the scale requires revisiting original assumptions in the Interne