Mobile multimedia DRM (digital rights management) for hand-held devices

Mobile multimedia streaming applications have been widely propagated with the rapid evolution of mobile handsets, especially MPEG-4 video streams over wireless communication networks. We propose an efficient encryption scheme on the media data that are encoded with MPEG-4 video format. We constructed 4 methods, namely the encryption of I-, P-, B-VOPs (video object planes) and a combination of these three types of encryption. They are designed for DRM services on a mobile multimedia streaming system without performance degradation that could be a burden to a mobile handset. We report the competitiveness of these methods from the perspective of performance evaluation with respect to plain MPEG-4 files.