Survey of User Control about Multicast Services

Multicast provides an efficient transport mechanism for one-to-many and many-to-many communication and it becomes one hot research area- The open properties that make multicast attractive, however, also bring security problem. The vulnerabilities of security that made by multicast properties are classified, and the necessary of multicast user control is presented in this paper. Then the focus is on the four research area about multicast user control: receiver access control,source access control,source authentication and division of group information. With the commercial development of multicast, a perfect multicast user access control mechanism is needed by the ISPs to manage multicast services.