An effective adaptation of encryption on MPEG-4 video streams for digital rights management in an ubiquitous computing environment

Abstract

This paper suggests encryption methods, which are applicable to the media data that are encoded with MPEG-4 video format and reports competitiveness of these methods on the perspective of performance evaluation with respect to the plain MPEG-4 flies. We constructed 3 methods, one is the way we can encrypt Macroblocks(MBs) of I-VOP(Video Object Plane), another is P-VOP's MBs encryption and the other is the combination of these two methods. They were designed to supply Digital Rights Management(DRM) services for a video streaming system without performance degradation that could be a burden to a large networked service framework, such as a commercial delivery system on mobile or ubiquitous computing environments, where there is inherently preferred system costs for low-power, low-network bandwidth. We found that, by considering VOP and time consumption for a whole media encryption, it is feasible to build a pertinent DRM service on the multimedia delivery system with these methods. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.