A Format-Compliant Selective Encryption Scheme for Real-Time Video Streaming of the H.264/AVC

H.264 video coding standard is one of the most promising techniques for the future video communications. In fact, it supports a broad range of applications. Accordingly, with the continuous promotion of multimedia services, H.264 has been widely used in real-world applications. A major concern in the design of H.264 encryption algorithms is how to achieve a sufficiently high security level, while maintaining the efficiency of the underlying compression process. In this paper a new selective encryption scheme for the H.264 standard is presented. The aim of this work is to study the security of the H.264 standard in order to propose the appropriate design of a hardware cryptoprocessor based on a stream cipher algorithm. Since the proposed cryptosystem is mainly dedicated to the multimedia applications, it provides multiple security levels in order to satisfy the requirements of various applications for different purposes while ensuring higher coding efficiency. Different performance analyses were made in order to evaluate the new encryption system. The experimental results showed the reliability and the robustness of the proposed technique. Keywords—component; Video coding; Data encryption; Data compression; H.264/AVC