An overview on scalable encryption for wireless multimedia access

Wireless environments present many challenges for secure multimedia access, especial streaming media. The availability of varying network bandwidths and diverse receiver device processing powers and storage spaces demand scalable and flexible approaches that are capable of adapting to changing network conditions as well as device capabilities. To meet these requirements, scalable and fine granularity scalable (FGS) compression algorithms were proposed and widely adopted to provide scalable access of multimedia with interoperability between different services and flexible support to receivers with different device capabilities. Encryption is one of the most important security tools to protect content from unauthorized use. If a medium data stream is encrypted using non-scalable cryptography algorithms, decryption at arbitrary bit rate to provide scalable services can hardly be accomplished. If a medium compressed using scalable coding needs to be protected and non-scalable cryptography algorithms are used, the advantages of scalable coding may be lost. Therefore scalable encryption techniques are needed to provide scalability or to preserve the FGS adaptation capability (if the media stream is FGS coded) and enable intermediate processing of encrypted data without unnecessary decryption. In this paper, we will give an overview of scalable encryption schemes and present a fine grained scalable encryption algorithm. One desirable feature is its simplicity and flexibility in supporting scalable multimedia communication and multimedia content access control in wireless environments.