A format-compliant configurable encryption framework for access control of video

Abstract

We introduce new methods of performing selective encryption and spatial/frequency shuffling of compressed digital content that maintain syntax compliance after content has been secured. The tools described have been proposed to the MPEG-4 Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) standardization group and have been adopted into the MPEG-4 IPMP Final Proposed Draft Amendment (FPDAM). We describe the application of the new methods to the protection of MPEG-4 video content in the wireless environment, and illustrate how they are used to leverage established encryption algorithms for the protection of only the information fields in the bitstream that are critical to the reconstructed video quality, while maintaining compliance to the syntax of MPEG-4 video, and thereby reduces the amount of data to be encrypted and guarantees the inheritance of many of the good properties of the unprotected bitstreams that have been carefully studied and built, such as error resiliency and network friendliness. The encrypted content bitstream works with many existing random access, network bandwidth adaptation, and error control techniques that have been developed for standard-compliant compressed video, thus making it especially suitable for wireless multimedia applications. Standard compliance also allows subsequent signal processing techniques to be applied to the encrypted bitstream.