Protection of multicast scalable video by secret sharing: simulation results

Security is an increasingly important attribute for multimedia applications that require prevention of unauthorized access to copyrighted data. Two approaches have been used to protect scalable video content in distribution: Partial encryption and progressive encryption. Partial encryption provides protection for only selected portions of the video. Progressive encryption allows transcoding with simple packet truncation, and eliminates the need to decrypt the video packets at intermediate network nodes with low complexity. Centralized Key Management with Secret Sharing (CKMSS) is a recent approach in which the group manager assigns unique secret shares to the nodes in the hierarchical key distribution tree. It allows the reconstruction of different keys by communicating different activating shares for the same prepositioned information. Once the group key is established, it is used until a member joins/leaves the multicast group or periodic rekeying occurs. In this paper, we will present simulation results regarding the communication and processing requirements of the CKMSS scheme applied to scalable video. In particular, we have measured the rekey message size and the processing time needed by the server for each join/leave request and periodic rekey event.