The Price of Secure Mobile Video Streaming

The cryptographic algorithms providing unquestionable security are usually complex. From this point of view, it is reasonable that high bit rate secure live video streams require significant processing power from the end devices. To cope with the demands, there are many publications suggesting a kind of selective video encryption that reduce the burden by ciphering only a part of the video stream. As a tradeoff, the security level decreases. On the other hand, recently the retail price of the efficient hardware based cryptographic chips is dropped and devices became more and more resourceful. This is true for the mobile sector as well. In this article, based on measurements, we prove that the fully encrypted high bit rate mobile video streaming is a true possibility today, moreover there are certain scenarios where it is advised to be used. The resource barrier is no longer the processing capacity, rather the network link.