The disclosed embodiments provide a system that provides wireless service groups. During operation, a wireless device's advertising mechanism advertises a service group over Wi-Fi, wherein the service group comprises at least the wireless device and wherein the service group's security requirements regulate multicast protection within the service group. In response to receiving a request from a second device to be admitted into the service group, the wireless device's security mechanism admits the second device into the service group and sends the service group's security requirements to the second device, thereby enabling the second device to initialize multicast protection in accordance with the service group's security requirements.