Digital rights and secure media

Research opportunities

Concerns about the security and control of digital multimedia are holding back creators and owners of some of the world’s most popular songs, movies and television shows from sharing or selling their content in a digital form.

Media owners are wary that their material will be used in unauthorized ways when not protected by strong enforcement technologies. In particular, they are seeking methods for preventing unauthorized distribution, rendering, modification and resale. At the same time, these measures should not inconvenience customers who want to enjoy these protected artistic creations.

Research focus

Current work

Researchers are developing advanced technical solutions to offer multimedia content owners the same security protections available for other electronic information. Core technologies being deployed include cryptography (encryption, digital signatures), identity management, robust implementations, rights expression languages and media formatting.

A DRM system, which builds upon these core technologies, is a collection of techniques for managing ownership and usage rights associated with digital media content. Unfortunately, different digital media networks (such as those run by Microsoft, Apple and mobile phone companies) have different DRM systems.

That makes it hard, if not impossible, to transfer protected multimedia content across the systems -- the right to play content on one system (i.e., iTunes) does not imply the right to play on a device that belongs to another system (i.e., a multimedia-enabled mobile phone).

HP Labs recognizes this interoperability problem and is a leading technical contributor to the Coral Consortium -- a widely supported industry group developing an open technology framework for DRM interoperability.

Technical contributions

HP researchers developed an approach for adapting and processing encrypted content -- without decryption of the content. This capability is particularly useful for content distribution where it may be necessary, for example, to reduce the media bit rate while preserving the end-to-end security.

This work was incorporated into the JPEG 2000 Security (JPSEC) standard for security of digital imagery -- the first technical standard to tie media and security tightly together -- which became an official ISO/IEC standard in 2006.

Researchers continue to innovate and contribute to the relevant standards as the industry works toward establishing similar standards for audio and video security.

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