Secure production of digital media

Abstract

Today more and more media data is produced completely in the digital domain without die need of analogue input. This brings an increase of flexibility and efficiency in media handling, as distributed access, duplication and modification are possible without the need to move or touch physical data carriers. But this also reduces the security of the process: Without physical originals to refer to, changes in the material can remain unnoticed, at the end making the manipulated data the new original. Theft and illegal copies in the digital domain can happen without notice and loss of quality. We therefore see the need of setting up secure media production environments, where access control, integrity and copyright protection as well as traceability of individual copies are enabled. Addressing this need, we design a framework for media production environments, where mechanisms like encryption, digital signatures and digital water-marking help to enable a flexible yet secure handling and processing of the content. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.