Secure video distribution scheme based on partial encryption

In TV program distribution, the receiver's identification information is embedded into video data in order to trace illegal distributors, and video data are encrypted in order to protect the confidentiality against unauthorized users. In traditional method, the TV program is firstly fingerprinted, then encrypted, and finally transmitted. For N receivers, N times of encryption, and N times of fingerprinting operations are required, which makes the sender of high loading. In another method, the media content is decrypted and fingerprinted simultaneously by the joint fingerprint embedding and decryption, which is difficult to obtain reasonable performances. In this article, a commutative encryption and fingerprinting scheme is proposed to reduce the sender's loading. In this scheme, the TV program is firstly encrypted, then fingerprinted, and finally transferred. When compared with the traditional method, in the proposed method, only once encryption and N times of fingerprinting are required, which reduces the sender's loading greatly. Based on MPEG2 videos, a commutative encryption and fingerprinting scheme is presented, whose performances including security, efficiency, robustness, and imperceptibility are evaluated. Experimental results show that the scheme obtains good performances and is suitable for TV program distribution. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 19, 227–235, 2009