Supporting flexible streaming media protection through privacy-aware secure processors

Abstract

Due to the explosion of Internet technology in the last decade, there is an increasing demand for secure and effective streaming media protection (SMP) in the new computing environment. Since end users usually have the full control of their machines, pure software based approaches such as user/password validation and group key based content encryption, are not sufficient to defend many attacks, in particular, malicious key sharing. On the other hand, existing hardware-based approaches tend to be too restrictive to adopt. The emerging secure processor designs provide a new direction for hardware assisted streaming media protection (H-SMP). The research in the computer architecture community has shown that secure processors can help to defend various types of attacks such as those with a hijacked and malicious OS. However existing designs focus on securing point-to-point data transfers and face both privacy and performance issues when supporting group-oriented applications, e.g. video on-demand. In this paper, we present privacy-aware secure processor designs for H-SMP against key sharing. We first categorize different protection policies, compare their advantages and disadvantages, and then discuss the novel hardware enhancements including instruction set extensions for supporting these policies. We elaborate the implementation details and present the security and performance analyses.