License Protection with a Tamper-Resistant Token

Content protection mechanisms are intended to enforce the usage rights on the content. These usage rights are carried by a license. Sometimes, a license even carries the key that is used to unlock the protected content. Unfortunately, license protection is difficult, yet it is important for digital rights management (DRM). Not many license protection schemes are available, and most if not all are proprietary. In this paper, we present a license protection scheme, which exploits tamper-resistant cryptographic hardware. The confidentiality and integrity of the license or parts thereof can be assured with our protection scheme. In addition, the keys to unlock the protected content are always protected and stored securely as part of the license. We verify secrecy and authentication aspects of one of our protocols. We implement the scheme in a prototype to assess the performance.

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