Privacy Engineering for Digital Rights Management Systems

Internet-based distribution of mass-market content provides great opportunities for producers, distributors, and consumers, but it may seriously threaten users’ privacy. Some of the paths to loss of privacy are quite familiar (e.g., mining of credit-card data), but some are new or much more serious than they were in earlier distribution regimes. We examine the contributions that digital-rightsmanagement (DRM) technology can make to both compromising and protecting users’ privacy. We argue that the privacy-enhancing technology (e.g., encryption, anonymity, and pseudonymity) that absorbs most of the attention of the security R&D community cannot by itself solve the privacy problems raised by DRM, although it can play a role in various solutions. Finally, we provide a list of “privacy engineering” principles for DRM systems, some of which are easy to implement and potentially quite effective. The goal of DRM technology is distribution of digital content in a manner that protects the rights of all parties involved, including (but not necessarily limited to) copyright owners, distributors, and users. Appendix A below contains a detailed description of a generic DRM system and its technical components. Here, we give a high-level description that suffices for our purpose, which is exploration of the interplay among DRM systems, user privacy, and business and legal issues. The following is a list, adapted from Chapter 5 of [27], of some of the security technologies that often play a role in DRM: