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ABSTRACT
VoD(video on demand), the industry even goes in front of
research.
With the rapid growth of broadband network, distribution of
multimedia via Internet is a must way to go. Content protection
In this paper, we study the multimedia content protection by
has become one of the most significant and challenging problems
exploiting public key cryptosystem within tamper-resistant
of this field. In this paper, we propose a general scheme that
hardware devices. We propose a scheme that can be applied to
combines public key cryptography and watermarking technology
video, audio and any other multimedia digital objects. The design
together, to achieve wonderful content protection. The scheme is
presented in this paper is in a very general frame. More detailed
reliable, flexible and efficient.
studies must be done if the design is being developed into any
real system for practical use.
Keywords
The new system of content protection proposed in this paper has
Multimedia content protection, public key cryptography,
many good fe atures. The most importa nt and prominent one is
watermarking technology, tamper-resistant hardware.
that it meets the discipline that
component-compromising must
not cause the whole system crashing
. Most of the available
systems unfortunately do not fulfill this requirement. We believe
that the frame presented in this paper is the only correct direction
1. INTRODUCTION
to go.
It is predicted that within five years a consumer will be able to
purchase a computer with a 2 GHz microprocessor, 1 GB of
2. WATERMARKING
memory, and a 50 GB hard disk for several hundred dollars. The
Content protection is the key security issue for e-commerce of
computer will be to connect to the Internet via a 1 Gb connection
digital goods, no matter the transacted content is a picture, a
or a 10 Mb wireless network. At home, users will be able to surf
video, an audio or a piece of news. It is a common sense that no
the Web using a 1 Mb+ telephone or television network. With
digital content provider can survive without certain means of
these amazing microprocessors, memories, hard disks, and
protection. SDMI, for example, is an effort toward the protection
bandwidths, many things that are barely imaginable today will
of online music. Watermarking technology has been considered
become possible. Internet multimedia time is definitely coming.
to be a key technology for multimedia content protection. There
On-line video, on-line audio, on-line games, on-lines e -books etc
have been so many research papers addressing watermarking
will greatly enrich people's entertainment.
technology in the past several years. Readers are referred to [3, 5,
With the speed, storage and networking getting ready, the
6, 17] and the references therein.
concentration is more focused on the security technologies for
There are two sorts of watermarking. The first one is for
multimedia content protection. It is well known that the
ownership. The second one is for tracing illegal users. The
copyright of digital objects is very easy to be infringed. A
technique of the second sort is also called fingerprinting in some
multimedia content provider needs protection not only by
references.
legislation, but also by reliable and convincing technologies.
The first sort of watermarking is to embed an identical
A huge amount of research work has been done in this area and
watermark into every copy of the digital object. Hence, it cannot
various technologies have appeared. Watermarking is one of the
be used to distinguish who is the user who has distributed the
most studied technologies toward copyright protection of
illegal copy. The technology can only deter the large-scale resale.
multimedia files, such as digital pictures, digital music, digital
There are a lot of research publications on this technology.
video etc.
The second sort is to embed different watermarks into different
On-line multimedia distribution is interested not only by the
copies. Hence it can be used to trace the illegal users. But this
research community, but also by industry, due to its huge
sort of watermarking has two drawbacks. The first one is that it
potential market. It is pointed out in [8] that in some areas, say
is quite expensive to resist colluding attack. The other one is, as