Secure Multicast Content Delivery

Challenges

Today, critical decisions are information driven and supporting systems use ever increasing amounts of data. Whether protecting secrets or securing intellectual property, dissemination of data quickly, efficiently, reliably, and securely is critically important. Many businesses and industries find themselves in need of secure, and reliable multicast content distribution, but struggle to find security products that meet all of these criteria. Traditional technologies can be used, such as VPN, file encryption, or encrypted multicast, however these options do not properly address the particular issues faced in securely delivering content to multiple destinations.

Existing Technologies

Standard VPN technologies scale well for IP unicast traffic, however these solutions prove to be inefficient for content delivery because data must be encrypted separately for each connected client. Hardware resource and administrative requirements increase indefinitely with added clients. This approach may be impractical or impossible for broad distribution and/or large quantities of data, particularly when the delivery is regularly occurring, such as is the case with broadcast media, field data, and other continuous information sources.

Encrypted multicast protocol provides the low delay and high efficiency that are lacking in the above options, but includes a weakness shared with the encrypt-then-transfer approach. Information is encrypted with the same key for every client. This presents multiple weaknesses. First, the potential for an attacker to subvert the system by compromising a single client is greater, since the encryption key is shared system-wide. Also, because the encrypted data is being broadcast on multiple vectors, there is a greater surface area for an attack by analyzing the encrypted data.

Existing approaches don’t provide a complete solution. Each method outlined exhibits weakness of security, falls short from a performance standpoint, or fails completely to address the needs of a secure content delivery mechanism. What is needed is a truly new approach to securing broadcast data that is reliable, high performance, and resource efficient.

The Solution: Revolution Security and RPM

Revolution Security offers a multi-service network appliance utilizing Relevant Security Corporation’s patented RPM technology to create the most secure network for the transmission of data, voice, and video on the market.

To download the complete White Paper, click on the Download Document link located in the menu on right.