How to sign digital streams

Abstract

We present a new efficient paradigm for signing digital streams. The problem of signing digital streams to prove their authenticity is substantially different from the problem of signing regular messages. Traditional signature schemes are message oriented and require the receiver to process the entire message before being able to authenticate its signature. However, a stream is a potentially very long (or infinite) sequence of bits that the sender sends to the receiver and the receiver is required to consume the received bits at more or less the input rate and without excessive delay. Therefore it is infeasible for the receiver to obtain the entire stream before authenticating and consuming it. Examples of streams include digitized video and audio files, data feeds, and applets. We present two solutions to the problem of authenticating digital streams. The first one is for the case of a finite stream which is entirely known to the sender (say a movie). We use this constraint to devise an extremely efficient solution. The second case is for a (potentially infinite) stream which is not known in advance to the sender (for example a live broadcast). We present proofs of security of our constructions. Our techniques also have applications in other areas, for example, efficient authentication of long files when communication is at a cost and signature-based filtering at a proxy server. © 2001 Academic Press.