Mobile Agent-Based Digital Rights Management Scheme

In the paper, we introduce a mobile software agent-based scheme for digital rights management targeted for personal mobile devices. The goal of the proposed scheme is to provide a solution secure yet simple to implement and maintain for controlled consumption of digital media objects. In order to protect the digital content in transport and to prevent non-authorized use, we apply a combination of a threshold scheme, one-time password system, key agreement protocol, and clueless mobile agents. Here, every participating software agent receives a share from a dealer and only the end user is able to decrypt the DRM content after gathering all the shares. Clueless mobile agents traveling between the participants´ sites do the distribution and the gathering of the shares. The proposed DRM scheme is compared to the industry-leading Open Mobile Alliance´s digital rights management specification and their applicability and the differences are thoroughly discussed. Finally, we evaluate the weaknesses of the scheme and propose few variants satisfying different security requirements.