Security model for large scale content distribution applied to federated virtual environments

Abstract

In federated multimedia systems new services can be dynamically added or updated, thus a synergy effect related to integration of distributed communities of users and service providers can be observed. However, the inherent security limitation of such systems is implied by malicious host problem, particularly the risk that host software would be modified in order to e.g. violate data confidentiality. In the proposed model the distributed content consumers are provided with encryption scheme securing the confidentiality and integrity of the content roaming with them from host to host e.g. in federated virtual environment. The decryption keys, shared with threshold schemes, are produced in particles that correspond to the subsets of the multimedia content with respect to its structure. The scenes can be reconstructed collectively, but in a selective manner, according to the user privileges. In consequence, the model allows for placing content safely on virtual environment hosts and mitigates the problem of the host code that can be malicious. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.