Scalable streaming media authentication

Consumer networks, increasingly used for multimedia information and commercial content delivery, are destined to be heterogeneous. To provide QoS, it is necessary to adapt the multimedia stream to the heterogeneous network channel conditions and device capabilities. Meanwhile, security is an important component to restrict unauthorized multimedia content access and distribution. This suggests the need for a new cryptography system implementations that can operate at different data rates, i.e., be scaled to various multimedia content, different network topology, changing bandwidth, and diverse receiver device capabilities. Content authentication is one important security tool for secure multimedia content communication. Conventional message authentication schemes do not offer suitable scalability for this new set of applications. In this paper, we study the design of scalable media data stream authentication and present a framework for multimedia authentication that supports various kinds of scalability.