Digital rights management system with user privacy, usage transparency, and superdistribution support

Abstract

SUMMARYIn the modern world, digital content has been massively produced, distributed, and consumed by human beings; consequently, how to protect the rights and benefits of content consumers, producers, and distributors has become a crucial issue. One promising solution is to design a full‐fledged digital rights management (DRM) system. In this study we introduce a new design on the digital rights management system providing user privacy, usage transparency, and superdistribution. A comprehensive set of DRM processing functions and corresponding mechanisms are developed in our system to support various business process requirements. Superdistribution support is embedded in our system design. A prototype is implemented to verify our system design. To protect consumer privacy, a temporary identity is generated for each consumer using the KryptoKnight protocol. Elliptic curve cryptography‐based encryption scheme is adopted for messages transmitted among servers and client over an unsecure communication channel. For usage transparency, a user‐friendly DRM client package (software) is introduced in the proposed DRM system to achieve content protection and support user convenience in usage.Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.