Group-oriented communications will play a significant role in the next
generation of networks as many services, such as pay-per-view media
broadcasts and the delivery of network control messages, will rely upon
the ability to reliably deliver data simultaneously to a large group of
users. As these networks become increasingly pervasive and these
multi-user services become increasingly ubiquitous, it will become
essential that a complementary suite of security solutions are deployed
in order to protect these services from a broad spectrum of security
threats that are unique to group communications.
This book aims to fill a growing need in the research community for a
reference that describes the state of the art in securing group
communications. Network-Aware Security for Group Communications focuses
on tailoring the security solution to the underlying network
architecture (such as the wireless cellular network or the ad hoc/sensor
network), or to the application using the security methods (such as
multimedia multicasts).