End-To-End Security for Video Distribution: The Combination of Encryption, Watermarking, and Video Adaptation

Abstract

End-to-end security for video distribution: the combination of encryption, watermarking, and video adaptation AbstractAbstract. Content distribution applications such as digital broadcasting, video-on-demand services (VoD), video conferencing, surveillance and telesurgery are confronted with difficulties -besides the inevitable compression and quality challenges -with respect to intellectual property management, authenticity, privacy regulations, access control etc. Meeting such security requirements in an end-to-end video distribution scenario poses significant challenges. If the entire content is encrypted at the content creation side, the space for signal processing operations is very limited. Decryption, followed by video processing and re-encryption is also to be avoided as it is far from efficient, complicates key management and could expose the video to possible attacks. Additionally, also when the content is delivered and decrypted, the protection is gone. Watermarking can complement encryption in these scenarios by embedding a message within the content itself containing for example ownership information, unique buyer codes or content descriptions. Ideally, securing the video distribution should therefore be possible throughout the distribution chain in a flexible way allowing the encryption, watermarking and encoding/transcoding operations to commute. This paper introduces the reader to the relevant techniques that are needed to implement such an end-to-end commutative security system for video distribution, and presents a practical solution for encryption and watermarking compliant with H.264/AVC and the upcoming HEVC (High 1 Efficiency Video Coding) video coding standards. To minimize the overhead and visual impact, a practical trade-off between the security of the encryption routine, robust watermarking and transcoding possibilities is investigated. We demonstrate that our combined commutative protection system effectively scrambles video streams, achieving SSIM (Structural Similarity Index) values below 0.2 across a range of practical bit rates, while allowing robust watermarking and transcoding.

Effectiveness of crypto-transcoding for H.264/AVC and HEVC video bit-streams

“…The authors of [49] proposed an entropy-coding stage SE scheme that avoided affecting syntax elements which potentially might be manipulated by encryption. For example: splicing of video is suggests that Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) headers cannot be encrypted; motion information bits affect no-reference quality assessment [50]; compression domain insertion of watermarks [51] may be affected; and more specifically to the current paper, certain forms of compression domain transcoding [52] can be impacted. In fact, the possibility of combining more than one compression domain process, such as transcoding, watermarking, and encryption needs to be considered [51] [53].…”

Security Mechanisms Planning to Enforce Security Policies

“…Popa et al [19] and Bkakria et al [4] have proposed approaches based on adjustable encryption, they combine different encryption schemes to get the best trade-off between data confidentiality and data utility for outsourced relational databases. Boho et al [6] have proposed interesting approach combining watermarking and encryption to protect both the confidentiality and traceability 1 Databases composed of only one table of outsourced multimedia files. All previously cited approaches have three main limitations: First, they are defined in such a way that only two pre-selected security mechanisms can be combined together.…”

Video security assurance framework based on efficient Joint Cryptography Compression approach

“…From a security perspective, the random-based [3]- [5] and cryptographic primitives [6]- [9] are the main categories to classify the encryption used in JEC algorithms. The randombased scrambling uses PRNG [5] and chaotic-based [4] sources to deploy one of the randomization functionality such as sign or bit(s) inversion [3] or random mapping [10].…”

“…The randombased scrambling uses PRNG [5] and chaotic-based [4] sources to deploy one of the randomization functionality such as sign or bit(s) inversion [3] or random mapping [10]. The second main approach is based on cryptographic primitives such as hash functions [7], [11], block ciphers [6], [8] and stream ciphers [9]. Fig.…”