Secure interoperable digital content distribution mechanisms in a multi-domain architecture

Current DRM systems use the Authorized Domain concept to allow sharing of DRM-enabled multimedia contents across multiple devices. However, some devices in an authorized domain may support only a limited number of DRM systems of the content providers due to their heterogeneous capabilities. Lack of interoperability among DRM systems enforces these devices to stick to a common DRM system which restricts the sharing of different DRM-enabled multimedia contents among them. Most of the current solutions use a translation entity to provide interoperability among different DRM standards with a trust assumption over that entity. This assumption may not assure the content providers that their contents and licenses will be translated and distributed in a secure and legal way. In this paper, we propose a secure interoperable content distribution mechanism for commercial and user generated contents among multiple authorized domains without any trust assumption on the translation entity.