Trust Issues and Solutions in Multimedia Content Distribution

Multimedia content distribution is a key technique for multimedia services, which transmits multimedia content from a sender to certain receiver(s). With the popularity of multimedia services, the trust issues in content distribution becomes urgent, including the authorized access, privacy protection, trusted payment, piracy surveillance, and so forth. This chapter introduces the trust issues in multimedia content distribution (e.g., authorization, authentication, privacy, payment, ownership, illegal distribution, forgery, etc.), reviews the latest research progress of the solutions, and presents some open issues and promising research topics. It is expected to provide valuable information to researchers or engineers in this field. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-682-7.ch005 International Journal of Dependable and Trustworthy Information Systems, 1(3), 32-54, July-September 2010 33 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. an important topic (Kelton, et al., 2008). And, many discussions of trust in this environment focus on issues like security or technical reliability. Specially, in security engineering, a trusted system is a system that is relied upon to a specified extent to enforce a specified security policy (Taipale, 2005). As such, a trusted system is one whose failure may break a specified security policy. It is often defined from four aspects, i.e., classified information, trusted computing, policy analysis and information theory. In classified information, trusted systems are used for the processing, storage and retrieval of sensitive or classified information. In trusted computing, trust is used by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG, 2009) mainly in the sense of authorization that defines whether a user is authorized to do something. In policy analysis, trusted systems in the context of national or homeland security, law enforcement, or social control policy are systems in which some conditional prediction about the behavior of people or objects within the system has been determined prior to authorizing access to system resources. In information theory, a trusted system is based on the definition of ‘Trust is that which is essential to a communication channel but cannot be transferred from a source to a destination using that channel’ (Gerck, 1998). This chapter will focus on the trust in security engineering. Multimedia content distribution (e.g., digital TV, mobile TV, IPTV, online music, etc.) is a kind of digital information system (Lian & Zhang, 2009), which becomes more and more popular with the rapid development of network technology and multimedia technology. Thus, the trust in multimedia content distribution is urgent, especially the security aspects. Generally, a multimedia distribution system, composed of the sender (and device), receiver (and device), transmission channel, storage device, etc., distributes the multimedia content from the sender(s) to receiver(s) through various communication manners. Multimedia content’s properties, such as large volumes, worthy commerce value, real time interaction, etc., make multimedia distribution systems different from traditional information systems. Till now, some means to confirm the trust in multimedia distribution have been proposed (Lian, 2009). However, few works has been done to show the progress of trust issues and solutions in this field. This chapter aims to review the latest research results in trust issues and solutions for multimedia distribution, and provide valuable information to researchers or engineers. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews related work. A number of trust issues in multimedia content distribution are discussed in Section 3. In Section 4, solutions to ensure trust are introduced in detail. Furthermore, we propose some open issues and hot topics in Section 5. Finally, conclusions are drawn in the last section.