RDEA: A Novel Video Encryption Algorithm

Abstract

More and more video encryption algorithms have been proposed with the popularity of multimedia applications and the necessity of content protection. Selective encryption algorithms are widely used because they can improve encryption efficiency meanwhile preserve the level of security. Visual degradation, security, encryption efficiency, compression friendliness, format compliance and codec compliance are used to evaluate a selective encryption algorithm. In this paper a novel video encryption algorithm called Random Data Encryption Algorithm (RDEA) is proposed. RDEA takes advantage of the fact that I-blocks are more important than P- and B-blocks, and selects data in I-blocks of I-, P- and B-frames to encrypt. The data is selected according to a pseudo-random sequence generated by a random sequence generator using a key as seed. The encryption ratio of RDEA is about 20%-35%, while it is almost as safe as naive encryption algorithm when it comes to ciphertext-only attack and known-plaintext attack. Also, RDEA keeps format compliant and has no impact on compression efficiency.