System and method for multicasting IPSec protected communications

摘要

A system and method is provided which allows multicast communications encrypted using IPSec protocol to be received by receivers in a network. In order to allow the receivers to receive the encrypted multicast communication, the address information of the received multicast communication is modified to appear as a unicast communication being transmitted directly to the address of the receiver, such that the receiver may then decrypt the received multicast communication using IPSec decryption capabilities or may, alternatively, forward the received multicast communication in its encrypted state to other devices. The system and method further provide IPSec encryption key delivery to the receiver using an encrypted markup language file. Multiple keys may also be generated for a given IP address of a receiver with each key being generated for a particular multicasting hierarchical classification.