Usage Control Model for Digital Rights Management in Digital Home Networks

The free distribution, unauthorized usage, and illicit sharing of copyrighted digital contents have become a common phenomenon with the rapid triple-play progress. The digital home network (DHN) is confronted with the open issue of digital rights management, and there is a lack of a formalized usage control model as well as some killer applications. The paper proposes a role-based cross-domain usage control model called the RCDUCM for DHN, which embraces two primary features of both role-based access control and security domain constraint management. RCDUCM is visually modeled by Unified Modeling Language to shorten the gap between the theoretical model and digital rights management applications. An application case denotes that the proposed model can implement consumer-contents-device license binding and transferring, the result of which is copyright protection of purchased digital contents against malicious piracy.