In today's digital world, multimedia content is delivered to homes via the Internet, satellite, terrestrial and cable networks. Scrambling is a common approach used by conditional access systems to prevent unauthorized access to audio/visual data. The descrambling keys are securely distributed to the receivers in the same transmission channel. Their protection is an important part of the key management problem. Although public-key cryptography provides a viable solution, alternative methods are sought for economy and efficiency. This paper presents a key transport protocol based on secret sharing. It eliminates the need for a cipher, yet combines the advantages of symmetric and public-key ciphers.

Date Published: 1 August 2001
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 4314, Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents III, (1 August 2001); doi: 10.1117/12.435393

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4314:
Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents III
Ping Wah Wong; Edward J. Delp III, Editor(s)