A secure media streaming mechanism combining encryption, authentication, and transcoding

Technology advancements are allowing more and more new media applications and services to be delivered over the Internet. Many of these applications and services require flexibility in media distribution as well as security in protecting the confidentiality of media content and ensuring its authenticity. However, achieving flexibility and achieving security are conventionally conflicting with each other. This is mainly because that security is traditionally implemented in a media-unaware manner that naturally prevents flexible handling of the media content during its distribution. This paper shows that the two goals can be simultaneously accomplished by making an overall plan and taking into consideration all the factors: coding, encryption, packetization, authentication, and transcoding. It emphasizes sender authentication, which is a big security issue for media streaming, but somehow left unresolved. We propose a secure media streaming mechanism which supports media-aware encryption, sender authentication and secure transcoding. Multimedia Application Routing Server (MARS) is especially used as an intelligent mid-network proxy with the ability to perform tasks of sender authentication and secure transcoding. A prototype system for securely streaming AVS media using MARS demonstrates the performance, thus proves the practicality of the proposed secure media streaming mechanism.