Current Digital Rights Management Research Articles

Blockchain and Cloud to Overcome the Problems of Buyer and Seller Watermarking Protocols

Copyright protection of digital content has become a problem not only for web content providers but also for ordinary web users who like to publish their digital contents on social or user generated content platforms. Among the possible solutions to such a problem, digital watermarking, in conjunction with watermarking protocols, appears to be a valid alternative to current DRM (digital rights management) systems. In fact, watermarking based solutions insert perceptually invisible copyright information into the copies of contents published or distributed on the web in order to track them. Such insertions are carried out according to the watermarking protocols, which have evolved over the years from the classic “buyer and seller” paradigm into a simpler and versatile “buyer friendly” and “mediated” approach. However, such an approach cannot exploit the new technologies that characterize the current Internet. This paper presents a new watermarking protocol able to adapt the “buyer friendly” and “mediated” approach to the use of innovative technologies such as cloud platforms and blockchain. In this way, (1) content providers and common web users can take advantage of the computing and storage resources made available by cloud platforms; (2) the involvement of trusted third parties in the protocols can be reduced by using blockchain without complicating the protection scheme. In fact, these two goals make the protocol particularly suited for the current Internet.

Y-DWMS: A Digital Watermark Management System Based on Smart Contracts.

With the development of information technology, films, music, and other publications are inclined to be distributed in digitalized form. However, the low cost of data replication and dissemination leads to digital rights problems and brings huge economic losses. Up to now, existing digital rights management (DRM) schemes have been powerless to deter attempts of infringing digital rights and recover losses of copyright holders. This paper presents a YODA-based digital watermark management system (Y-DWMS), adopting non-repudiation of smart contract and blockchain, to implement a DRM mechanism to infinitely amplify the cost of infringement and recover losses copyright holders suffered once the infringement is reported. We adopt game analysis to prove that in Y-DWMS, the decision of non-infringement always dominates rational users, so as to fundamentally eradicate the infringement of digital rights, which current mainstream DRM schemes cannot reach.

Design of user-centric semantic rights model for validation of user-generated content

In these days, the creative user really enjoys creating digital items and sharing their works with other people on the Web. Most users, who create digital contents, want to make secured packages of their works and distribute them with the attachment of valid licenses. Current digital rights management (DRM) systems, however, do not provide the functionality that supports the requirement of the creative users who are considered as just consumers by the current available DRM systems. To make the user-centric DRM functionality possible, we found that license management should be more intelligent to enable users make appropriate licenses for the secured distribution of their created works. In this paper, we define the semantic-based rights expression and management model for the user generated content. Each user created content can have one or more licenses with different types, reproduction, distribution, and usage. Based on our semantic license model and big data analytics, we can support a new business model in which users can sell and buy their created digital items in a secure environment.

Integrating the Functional Encryption and Proxy Re-cryptography to Secure DRM Scheme

The current Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems use attribute-based encryption (ABE) and proxy re-encryption (PRE) to achieve fine-grained access control in cloud computing. However, these schemes have some limitations particularly in terms of security, functionality and also higher decryption time which grows linearly with the complexity of access policies. In this paper, we propose a novel DRM scheme founded on a deterministic finite automata-based functional proxy re-encryption (DFA-based FPRE) scheme which has been proven to be secure against CCA in the standard model. In particular, we leverage the DFA-based FPRE scheme to realize fine-grained access control over encrypted contents among a set of users. Furthermore, a secure content key distribution protocol and efficient revocation mechanism are provided. Moreover, we tackle the critical issue of high computation at the user side, by outsourcing computation into (DFA-based FPRE) scheme for the first time. In comparison, our scheme achieves higher efficiency and smaller computation time against state-of-the-art.

Verifiable Threshold Authorization for Scalable and Secure Digital Rights Management

With fast development of network computing and storage technologies, it became more and more convenient to share and spread digital resources through kinds of network services, however without protection and constraint of copyright, digital content can be illegally copied, altered and distributed, which could cause revenue loss to commercial digital resource providers, to solve this problem, digital rights management(DRM) is adopted to control copyrights of digital resources in a reasonable degree. Most of current DRM systems were built up in centered authorization mode which can work efficiently in normal case, but once the DRM administrator is unauthentic or the server collapsed, it will not provide authentication and authorization service again. In this paper, a verifiable threshold authorization scheme (VETAS) based on ellipse curve cryptosystem (ECC) and Lagrange polynomial is adopted for scalable and robust digital rights management, in which authorization was based on t-out of n qualified members, less than t members cannot implement authorization, and the system can still work well once part of the members are unauthentic. The advantage of the VETAS scheme is that it works in a “mutual authentication and threshold authorization” mode, thus end-user and the authorization center can authenticate each other to enhance security of corresponding identity, another advantage of the VETAS scheme is it can provide real-time rights management with fairly good robustness and reliability in a threshold authorization mode.

Privacy Enabled Digital Rights Management Without Trusted Third Party Assumption

Digital rights management systems are required to provide security and accountability without violating the privacy of the entities involved. However, achieving privacy along with accountability in the same framework is hard as these attributes are mutually contradictory. Thus, most of the current digital rights management systems rely on trusted third parties to provide privacy to the entities involved. However, a trusted third party can become malicious and break the privacy protection of the entities in the system. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel privacy preserving content distribution mechanism for digital rights management without relying on the trusted third party assumption. We use simple primitives such as blind decryption and one way hash chain to avoid the trusted third party assumption. We prove that our scheme is not prone to the “oracle problem” of the blind decryption mechanism. The proposed mechanism supports access control without degrading user's privacy as well as allows revocation of even malicious users without violating their privacy.

Digital rights management architectures

Digital rights management (DRM) is increasingly becoming a necessity for content management and distribution in highly networked environments such as the Internet. However, very few DRM models have been able to achieve commercial success and acceptance among users. This paper analyzes the problems with current DRM environments and proposes an open layered framework for development of DRM systems, where different technologies can interoperate within the framework. Furthermore, interoperability is studied in terms of the proposed layered framework, and problems posed by the current rights expression languages (RELs) are identified. We conclude that a refactoring of current RELs based on a set of design principles is necessary to achieve a reasonable level of DRM interoperability. We emphasize the need for middleware services for DRM, along with their responsibilities and places of operation within the proposed framework. Finally, a specific prototype architecture is introduced that makes use of existing infrastructures in order to implement a DRM environment consistent with the design principles described in this paper.

A Portable DRM Scheme Using Smart Cards

The Internet is a relatively friendly and convenient environment for allowing music, audio, video files, and other digital contents to be copied, modified, and distributed easily. Nevertheless, from the point view of content owners, copyrights protection and intellectual property rights are critical issues that involve revenue loss. The current digital rights management (DRM) systems provide an acceptable copyright protection solution. The DRM venders usually provide a function allowing consumers to migrate their authorized license from one device to another. Still, this function is restricted by the device type and network domain, which does not completely satisfy consumers' needs. However, a successful DRM system should make consumers willing to use it. Therefore, improving copyright protection convenience for consumers is a significant issue. In this paper, a portable DRM scheme in which the usage-rights follow the consumer, but not the device, is presented for constructing a flexible DRM system that improves portability, therefore allowing users to have content use rights on any devices. In addition, an awkward storage system for encrypted data does not need to be maintained by the proposed scheme, thereby giving a more secure, cost-effective solution.

Complementing DRM with digital watermarking: mark, search, retrieve

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show how digital watermarking can be applied to assist and improve cryptography‐based digital rights management (DRM) systems by allowing the protection of content beyond the domain protected by the DRM system.Design/methodology/approachDigital watermarking is a passive technology, not allowing the active prevention of copyright violations. But it allows the irreversible linking of information with multimedia data, ensuring that an embedded watermark can be retrieved even after analogue copies. Therefore watermarking can be used where DRM fails: whenever content needs to be moved out of the protected DRM domain, e.g. when playing back content via analogue output channels it can mark the content with information that would help to identify its origin if it is used for copyright violations. The remaining challenge now is to find the marked content within the channels regularly used for copyright violations. The paper therefore introduces a concept for scanning file sharing networks for marked content.FindingsThe vast number of files present in the file sharing networks prohibits every approach based on completely scanning and analysing each file. Therefore concepts for filtered search queries where only potentially watermarked files are downloaded are discussed.Originality/valueThe paper shows how watermarking can be applied as a technology to allow active content protection beyond the limitations of current DRM systems.