Abstract
Security is an increasingly important attribute for multimedia applications that require prevention of unauthorized access
to copyrighted data. Two approaches have been used to protect scalable video content in distribution: Partial encryption
and progressive encryption. Partial encryption provides protection for only selected portions of the video. Progressive
encryption allows transcoding with simple packet truncation, and eliminates the need to decrypt the video packets at
intermediate network nodes with low complexity.
Centralized Key Management with Secret Sharing (CKMSS) is a recent approach in which the group manager assigns
unique secret shares to the nodes in the hierarchical key distribution tree. It allows the reconstruction of different keys
by communicating different activating shares for the same prepositioned information. Once the group key is established,
it is used until a member joins/leaves the multicast group or periodic rekeying occurs. In this paper, we will present
simulation results regarding the communication, storage and processing requirements of the CKMSS scheme applied to
scalable video. In particular, we have measured the rekey message sizes, storage capacity, and processing times needed
by the server for each join/leave request and periodic rekey event.
