An efficient format compliant video encryption scheme for HEVC bitstream

In this paper, an efficient format compliant encryption method has been proposed to protect the video bitstream of the emerging video coding standard - HEVC. Through analysing the syntax structure of HEVC standard, the proposed method firstly selects the most significant syntax elements for video reconstruction to encrypt. In order to ensure the high efficiency of the proposed encryption method and the encrypted bitstream can be compatible with HEVC standard, four syntax elements, i.e mvd_sign_flag, coeff_sign_flag, the suffix of abs_mvd_minus2 and cu_qp_delta_abs are encrypted using AES (Advanced Encryption standard). Experimental results show that the proposed encryption scheme can not only guarantee highly perceptual security, but also resist replacement attacks. Furthermore, its computational complexity is relatively low, which is very suitable for real-time application and resource-limited systems.