A General Sharing Model Based on Proxy Re-encryption

Content sharing is one of the most significant issues of Digital Rights Management (abbr. DRM). Various schemes for content sharing have been presented in the past years. However, the main goals of these schemes are to solve portability problems instead of rational sharing between different users who are not family members. In this work, we propose an initial step toward this rational sharing and present a general sharing model based on proxy re-encryption. Our model can support the flexible sharing mechanism, with which the user can choose any of the purchased content to share with any legal device, and the content provider can know and limit the number of sharing devices to achieve some novel DRM policies such as pay-per-sharing. To our best knowledge, our sharing model is the first model for content sharing between different users´ devices who are not family members using proxy re-encryption. With rational applications, our model can benefit for both the user and content provider to achieve win-win development.