Compatible Digital Rights Management System on MS Windows Platform

Digital rights management systems (DRMS) tend to solve two aspects about rights protection of the protected content for content provider: access control and usage control. Access control concerns about how users access the content, while usage control focuses on how users use it. In this paper, we introduce some key techniques and strategies to overcome the difficulties in implementation of a compatible and transparent-to-user DRMS on Windows NT platforms. These techniques, including hardware fingerprint encryption (HFE), Win32 API Hook and kernel function interception, have been carried out and applied in experiments based on Adobe Reader (PDF file) and the results shows that they have the potential to solve both of the problems mentioned above.