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).