PrivDRM : a privacy-preserving secure Digital Right Management system

Digital Right Management (DRM) is a technology developed to prevent illegal reproduction and distribution of digital contents. It protects the rights of content owners by allowing only authorised consumers to legitimately access associated digital content. DRM systems typically use a consumer's identity for authentication. In addition, some DRM systems collect consumer's preferences to obtain a content license. Thus, the behaviour of DRM systems disadvantages the digital content consumers (i.e. neglecting consumers' privacy) focusing more on securing the digital content (i.e. biased towards content owners). This paper proposes the Privacy-Preserving Digital Rights Management System (PrivDRM) that allows a consumer to acquire digital content with its license without disclosing complete personal information and without using any third parties. To evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, a prototype of the PrivDRM system has been developed and investigated. The security analysis (attacks and threats) are analysed and showed that PrivDRM supports countermeasures for well-known attacks and achieving the privacy requirements. In addition, a comparison with some well-known proposals shows that PrivDRM outperforms those proposals in terms of processing overhead