Design of Efficient Robust and Secure Digital Rights Management Protocols

Abstract

The world's current progressive development in producing and distributing digital contents leads to the evolution of systems that could manage and control various operations on these contents. Moreover, the wide spreading of consumers of digital contents results in the need for preserving the security of these contents from illegal and unauthorized access and distribution. Digital rights management (DRM) protocols aim to provide the basic security services to the interchanged and consumed digital contents in order to manage digital copyrights for contents’ authors and producers. A more complex case in DRM is the management of enterprise sensitive data such as; financial records and marketing plans. The protocols designed for DRM of enterprise data are called enterprise digital rights management (E-DRM) protocols. Various E-DRM protocols have been proposed in recent years aiming to provide confidentiality, authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation services to enterprise’s data. However, most of these protocols have security and efficiency drawbacks and they did not address the problem of storing information securely, reliably, and efficiently. This thesis aims to use cryptographic primitives in the design of secure, robust, and efficient E-DRM protocols. A new computationally efficient version of the information dispersal algorithm (IDA) is also proposed. The proposed algorithm is used in the design of E-DRM protocols that makes these protocols more efficient and robust against malicious attacks. A complete E-DRM system with two main protocols is proposed. The proposed E-DRM protocols are analyzed to prove its security, efficiency, and robustness. A software implementation of the proposed E-DRM system is provided with performance testing. Test results proved the efficiency and robustness of the proposed protocols.