Secure Content Distribution Infrastructures

Abstract

As the Internet has become one of the most wide spread communication channel today the need for new and better services will continuously be required. From the start of the Internet, ARPANET \cite{RFC0871}, most of the content where text based. From the mid nineties and until today the use of new services as multimedia has increased tremendously. As more services are moving to the Internet, a great challenge will be to support heavy load on the Internet with new services and with a growing number of users. A common problem with services as multimedia is their bandwith consumption as of the vast amount of data involved. To support such services and the load they put on the network both the server architecture and the network will have to be designed to support these load requirements. One could argue that it is only a matter of increasing the bandwith. However this will always have some limitations. This is why we need networks, and supporting technologies, that can provide high bandwith and handle an increasing number of users.

We have seen that with these new services, as for multimedia, new content types have made its way to the Internet. With these new content types there has followed a need for security to protect the content. As many service providers wants to distribute copyright protected content they require that there is technology available to support this; for the protection of this content. This has also been the case for the movie industry, where they want to make their movies available but has some skepticism to the protection of their copyrights. These protection requirements have lead to a lot of research in this area, and now we see that there are several competing technologies available.

In this thesis we looks at several techniques for how to enable secure transfer of multimedia content over the Internet to support both copyright protection and content protection. This will include both distribution infrastructures and security protocols