An Efficient Security System for CABAC Bin-Strings of H.264/SVC

Abstract

The distribution of copyrighted scalable video content to differing digital devices requires protection during rendering and transmission. In this paper, we propose a complete security system for H.264/scalable video coding (SVC) video codec and present a solution for the bit-rate and format compliance problems by careful selection of entropy coder syntax elements (bin-strings) for selective encryption (SE), and the problem of managing multiple layer encryption keys for scalable video distribution. A standard key management protocol, multimedia Internet keying protocol, is implemented for the hierarchical key generation mechanism, in which a subscriber has only one encryption key to unlock all scalable layers that have been subscribed to. The evaluation demonstrates the resulting video quality degradation arising from SE for many <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CIF</i> and 4 <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CIF</i> test video sequences, without there being any impact upon the bit-rate or format compliancy, and with small computational delay. The security and statistical analysis performed further verify the effectiveness of the proposed security system for H.264/SVC. The proposed system is highly suitable for video distribution to users who have subscribed to a varying degree of video quality on devices with medium to high computational resources.