Securing Virtual Service Generation on the Network: Adapting Digital Rights Management to Cloud-Delivered Media

This work introduces a novel content protection security framework within the virtual Set-Top Box (vSTB) concept. This concept presents a fundamental change in the creation and delivery of media services such as IP Television, by shifting most of the STB’s service execution environment to a network infrastructure. This shift enables a so-called cloud-based rendering of the User Interface and therefore poses new challenges for the classical IPTV security mechanism. After successful tests on the conventional network infrastructure (legacy network), the vSTB concept takes the consolidated and virtualized network approach as its target architecture for the implementation of the vSTB Security Framework. This work briefly introduces the vSTB concept, comparing overall system latency for locallyand cloud-rendered IPTV User Interface. It also presents the novel vSTB High Level Security Framework within the virtualized network infrastructure, analyzing potential system vulnerabilities and security threats. This work defines security challenges and open issues that may arise in the context of virtual service generation and its delivery to lightweight hardware. The paper herewith provides a review of this new research topic, on which research has not yet been published.