Adaptation–aware encryption of scalable H.264/AVC video for content security

Data encryption is one of the key information security technologies used for safeguarding multimedia content from unauthorised access and manipulation in end-to-end delivery and access chains. This technology, combined with the appropriate cryptographic methods, effectively prevents the content against malicious attacks, so as to protect its authenticity as well as integrity. While encryption-based security is ensuring the authorised consumption of the multimedia content, content adaptation technologies have the primary goal of providing means for wider dissemination of the content across diverse networks, devices and users, and thus enriching user satisfaction and experience of the delivered content within a given set of usage environment constraints. Traditionally, protected contents can only be adapted at trusted adaptation engines residing between the source and end-users, since they have to be fully decrypted before performing the necessary adaptation operations. The drawback of such a process is that it significantly limits the availability and flexibility of adaptation engines applicable for adapting protected contents on the fly. Thus, this paper proposes a novel scalable H.264/advanced video coding (AVC)-compatible video encryption technique, which is also transparent to adaptation engines in an end-to-end video delivery scenario. The proposed technology relies on keeping syntax elements required for performing the adaptation operations clear (i.e., not encrypted). The effectiveness of the proposed technique has been successfully verified in scenarios, where both conventional joint scalable video model (JSVM) bit stream extracting and random packet dropping mechanisms are used.