Scalable security mechanisms in transport systems for enhanced multimedia services

Abstract

Data confidentiality is a very important issue for communication in open networks. Secure communication usually will be achieved by encryption mechanisms. For distributed multimedia applications the usage of encryption in real-time can cause a performance problem due to the time complexity of the cryptographic algorithms. In these cases partial encryption is a solution to satisfy real-time demands. In this paper we examine the usage of partial encryption in transport systems for multimedia data. This implies that the partial encryption scheme cannot take advantage of special properties of the multimedia data content. So we first demonstrate that in most cases it is sufficient to encrypt only a small portion of randomly chosen data from a video stream to achieve an adequate level of security. There are different approaches to integrate partial encryption mechanisms in transport systems. As a first approach, we investigate the integration in the transport layer. This offers several facilities for the integration. An alternative approach is located in the network layer, where alternative routing methods for a multimedia data stream are analyzed. A discussion of the impact of partial encryption to transport system mechanisms concludes this paper.