Multicast security protocol over satellite DVB based on chaotic sequences

The major problems of multicast satellite communications are the security and the scalability. The multicast protocols in digital video broadcasting via satellite (DVB-S) cause a massive load on the system resources, and create performance deterioration. In this paper, we propose a new encapsulation method derived from the unidirectional lightweight encapsulation (ULE) standard method, called enhanced ULE (EULE). The latter relies on the `spot beam´ technology and the `label-switching´ approach in order to ensure an efficient filtering and multicast forwarding. Additionally, we propose a new multicast security protocol in DVB-S which uses the EULE and provides all security services. The idea of our proposed protocol consists of using a 2-tiered architecture of independent logical key hierarchy (LKH), a satellite-layer and a terrestrial-layer. All the keys of both layers are obtained by chaotic generators. The chaos is also used to encrypt the keys and the transmitted multicast data in our system. The analysis of the proposed protocol shows that it can handle a very large multicast system securely and effectively. Simulated results reveal a low cost for data overhead and more than twofold reduction in bandwidth consumption for the key management data versus the best competitive method.