Introduction to special issue on secure multimedia services

Abstract

With the rapid development of communication technology, it becomes a reality to hear or watch anything, anywhere. Multimedia (image, video, audio, etc.) enriches human’s daily life, and various multimedia services attract more and more users, such as multimedia message services, color rings, mobile TV, IPTV, User Generated Content (UGC), p2p sharing, etc. However, its prosperity also attracts malicious attackers and abusers with different motivations, such as political reasons, illegal financial benefits, or simply to win a prestige reputation in the hacker community. The typical example is piracy, i.e., the original multimedia content is stolen and then redistributed to unauthorized users illegally, which causes great profit-losses to content producers or service providers. Solutions are needed to protect multimedia service systems. During the last decade, various techniques have been proposed to improve multimedia service systems’ security. For example, multimedia encryption is used for confidentiality protection of multimedia content, multimedia authentication for integrity detection, digital watermarking for ownership authentication or copy tracing, Conditional Access (CA) for access control, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) for copyright management, etc. In addition, in different networks, such as the Internet, 3G wireless, DVB-H and sensor network, different secure protocols and algorithms are required to provide system security. All these topics are in active development.