Secure IP multicast over satellite

We notice a very strong “all IP” trend characterizing today's communication technology. There is a powerful IP backbone in place, but, in some cases, the “last mile problem” remains to be solved. One of the solutions for this problem is represented by IP communications over satellite. This paper analyses the compatibility between a recently proposed security enhancement for IP communications over satellite DVB and the multicast communications. We discuss the importance of multicast services and we show that the recently proposed security enhancement has built in multicast support, i.e. only a small upgrade in the receivers is needed to allow multicast communications.