Secure Scalable Streaming for Integrity Verification of Media Data

In this paper, we present a method that enables secure and scalable streaming for multimedia content to a large-scale, heterogeneous clients. The secure streaming system must ensure point-to-point security while the content is adapted and streamed via intermediate, potentially untrusted transcoding network nodes. For providing both of the security and the scalability in media streaming service, secure scalable coding can be used in many applications. However, the conventional approaches based on secure scalable coding have three vulnerable threats related to integrity by the malicious attackers. First, unencrypted header that provides hints such as truncation points can be altered. Second, the spurious frames can be inserted instead of the encrypted content frames. Third, the group of packets can be dropped intentionally. These attacks may prevent normally to render the content with the guaranteed quality in clients. We propose a new scalable streaming method that simultaneously achieves confidentiality and integrity of media stream by using cryptographic primitives such as message authentication code (MAC) and hash chain.