End-to-end security for video distribution

Abstract

Content distribution applications such as digital broadcasting, video-on-demand services, video conferencing, surveillance, and telesurgery are confronted with difficultiesbesides the inevitable compression and quality challengeswith respect to intellectual property management, authenticity, privacy regulations, and access control. Meeting such security requirements in an end-to-end video distribution scenario poses significant challenges. If the entire content is encrypted at the content creation side, the space for signal processing operations is very limited. Decryption, followed by video processing and re-encryption is also to be avoided as it is far from efficient, complicates key management and could expose the video to possible attacks. Additionally, when the content is delivered and decrypted, the protection is gone. Watermarking can complement encryption in these scenarios by embedding a message within the content itself containing, for example, ownership information, unique buyer codes, or content descriptions. Ideally, securing the video distribution should therefore be possible throughout the distribution chain in a flexible way allowing the encryption, watermarking, and encoding/transcoding operations to commute. © 1991-2012 IEEE.status: publishe