Digital Rights Management system design and implementation issues

We live in the digital information age. The growth of new technologies for communication infrastructure and the wide availability of digital storage devices resulted in most data being produced, distributed and ultimately consumed by end users in digital form. The intrinsic nature of digital data makes the task of manipulating, replicating and distributing digital copies extremely easy. Publishing content covered by intellectual property or copyright is then faced by the challenge of countering illegal access to the digital good, while still enabling consumers to exercise their usage rights on purchased contents. Digital rights management (DRM) systems consist of architectures, protocols and technologies aimed at providing satisfactory solutions to the above problem. Broadcast encryption is a cryptographic primitive that a DRM system designer should investigate carefully. This paper aims to guide DRM system designers through the realm of broadcast encryption mechanisms and hence choose a suitable one for the application in hand.