Identity based protocols for secure electronic content distribution and licensing

Contemporary systems for distribution of electronic media content and its respective licenses are limited in a way that neither the consumers nor the vendors can operate in a reliable and flexible way. Further, the security architecture that comprises these systems is based and literally mapped upon them from security architectures, which apply to distributed systems based on computer terminals and not necessarily on mobile devices. The attempt to apply such architectures on the world of mobile multimedia so far has lead to solutions, which mostly rely on one single certification authority. It is more than obvious that this fact introduces the fatal risk of having a single-point-of-attack, since a compromise of the CA´s private key leads to a compromise of the entire system. Our proposal introduces protocols that utilize ID-based cryptographic methods, in order to provide electronic content delivery and licensing.