Establishing Multi-Party Trust Architecture for DRM by Using Game-Theoretic Analysis of Security Policies

A successful transaction of digital contents is primarily dependent on security policies, trust mechanisms and benefits balances, as well as the simple adoption of the combination of enhanced security policies would not effectively establish a trust relationship among various stakeholders in the DRM (Digital rights management)-enabling contents value chain. With respect to a generic DRM ecosystem, the hierarchy analyses of the multi-participant trust architecture were proposed based on the game-theoretic adoptions of security policies. By using formalized definitions of security components and services' utilities, we presented the choice of policies with the external relativity, in the contents acquisition scenario, as a multi-player simultaneous-move game referred to contents provider, digital services/rights provider and consumer. Also, in term of security policies combinations' utilities and benefit effects on participants, we further gained the game's Nash Equilibrium, which is a stable profile of security policies achieving the optimal balance of the security and utilities, thus establishing and strengthening the multi-party trust. The analytic conclusions show that enhanced security policies profile does not necessarily achieve optimal benefits balance in the one-stage game, for a small quantity of digital contents transactions. Whereas, the profile could transform into Nash Equilibrium with the increase of transaction sessions, meanwhile being Pareto Optimality.