Broadcast Encryption Schemes: A Comparative Study

We live in the digital information age. The growth of new technologies for communication infrastructure and the wide availability of digital storage devices resulted in most data being produced, distributed and ultimately consumed by end users in digital form. The intrinsic nature of digital data makes the task of manipulating, replicating and distributing digital copies extremely easy. Publishing content covered by intellectual property or copyright is then faced by the challenge of countering illegal access to the digital good, while still enabling consumers to exercise their usage rights on purchased contents. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems consist of architectures, protocols and technologies aimed at providing satisfactory solutions to the above problem. This paper aims to guide DRM system designers choose among cryptographic primitives available in the literature by offering a comparative study of some of the well-known constructions.