Design of A Generic and Scalable DRM Scheme using HC-256 Stream Cipher
Jun-Cheol Park · 2009
Digital Rights Management(DRM) is a term that refers technologies for imposing limitations on the use of digital content for protecting media copyright holders. This paper proposes a generic scheme for digital media copy protection that can be applied to any digital media such as audio, video, etc. The scheme will make it very hard to play a copied content on a foreign platform and to guess secret content encryption keys. Unlike other DRM techniques, the scheme uses the stream cipher HC-256 only for encrypting media content and it allows a client to start content playback immediately following its streamed decryption. As to the encryption, it requires to generate several secret keys for each new client(player copy), rather than for each media content, which makes it scalable in terms of managed keys. Also, for simplicity, the scheme supports the popular unlimited-play-after-download policy only, which would eliminate the necessity for deploying separate server or process for licensing.