Media Data Protection during Execution on Mobile Platforms – A Review

Multimedia content streaming has become an essential part of digital life. The media-ondemand (e.g., video on demand) service of certain enterprises, such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon etc. is changing the equations in which media content were accessed. The days, when one has to buy a bulk of media storage devices, or has to wait for the public broadcasting (e.g., television), to enjoy her preferred media has gone. Such change in the way of entertainment, however, has created new issues of piracy and unauthorized media access. To counter these concerns, the digital rights management (DRM) protection schemes have been adopted. In this report, we investigate one of the most important aspects of the DRM technology: the problem of protecting the clear text media content when playing licensing protected content on a mobile device. To this end, we first investigate how this problem has been addressed on different platforms and CPU architectures so far, and then discuss how virtualization technologies can be potentially used to protect the media pipe on mobile platforms. Our study will consider both industry-level and academic-level works, and will discuss the hardwarebased and software-based approaches.