Transparent encryption with scalable video communication: Lower-latency, CABAC-based schemes

Selective encryption masks all of the content without completely hiding it, as full encryption would do at a cost in encryption delay and increased bandwidth. Many commercial applications of video encryption do not even require selective encryption, because greater utility can be gained from transparent encryption, i.e. allowing prospective viewers to glimpse a reduced quality version of the content as a taster. Our lightweight selective encryption scheme when applied to scalable video coding is well suited to transparent encryption. The paper illustrates the gains in reducing delay and increased distortion arising from a transparent encryption that leaves reduced quality base layer in the clear. Reduced encryption of B-frames is a further step beyond transparent encryption in which the computational overhead reduction is traded against content security and limited distortion. This spectrum of video encryption possibilities is analyzed in this paper, though all of the schemes maintain decoder compatibility and add no bitrate overhead as a result of jointly encoding and encrypting the input video by virtue of carefully selecting the entropy coding parameters that are encrypted. The schemes are suitable both for H.264 and HEVC codecs, though demonstrated in the paper for H.264. Selected Content Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) parameters are encrypted by a lightweight Exclusive OR technique, which is chosen for practicality

Piracy Protection for Streaming Content in Home Networks

Part 4: Network Security and Security ProtocolsInternational audienceIn this paper we study content protection techniques to defend against piracy for streaming content in home networks where multiple digital devices are connected into a peer-based cluster and seamlessly work together. We are particularly interested in the anonymous rebroadcasting attack where pirates re-distribute the per-content encrypting key or the decrypted plain content. In literature, to defend against an anonymous attack, content is usually built with different variations. For example, content is divided into multiple segments, each segment comes with multiple variations (e.g., watermarks), and each variation is differently encrypted. Each device only has the key to decrypt and play back one variation per segment through the content. The re-distributed keys can be linked back and used to identify the original devices (terms as traitors) who were given those keys and involved in the piracy.This technology works well for prerecorded content scenarios in which a trusted party outside the device pool can deliberately author the content with multiple variations. However it cannot be applied to a peer-based home network when the streaming content is brought into the home network via a peer device who is not a special trust party and who is not allowed to know the secret keys of other peer devices. On the other hand, the trend of the consumer appetite for digital content is increasingly switching from physical media to streaming and internet consumption. In this paper we have designed the first content protection system that allows a recording device inside the home network to bring the streaming content into the home network in a secure way that devices and only devices in the same home network can playback the recording. More importantly, the recorded content without variations can still be used to obtain forensic information, when anonymous piracy attacks occurs, to identify the source devices that participated in the piracy attack. The identified traitorous devices can be revoked for future content access. The technology described in this paper is used to enable the secure sharing of premium quality High Definition content across a consumer’s all audio-video devices at its home networks

Digital Signets: Self-Enforcing Protection of Digital Information

The problem of protecting digital content -- software, video, documents, music, etc. -- from illegal redistribution by an authorized user, is the focus of considerable industrial and academic effort. In the absence of special-purpose tamperproof hardware, the problem has no cryptographically secure solution: once a legitimate user has purchased the content, the user, by definition, has access to the material and can therefore capture it and redistribute it. A number of techniques have been suggested or are currently employed to make redistribution either inconvenient or traceable. In this paper we introduce digital signets, a new technique for protecting digital content from illegal redistribution. The work motivates the study of the previously unexamined class of incompressible functions, analysis of which adds a cryptographic twist to communication complexity. 1 Introduction The problem of protecting mass-distributed digital content, such as software, audio, video, and digital libr..