Securing compressed video streams using RC4 encryption scheme

The multimedia technology facilitates the world to communicate faster with the multimedia systems like video communication(Video Telephony, HDTV), audio communication (Telephony), etc. With the faster communication medium more and more multimedia data are generated and transmitted in day to day life in the fields like medical, military, commercial, etc. The data in such fields may include some sensitive information which should be protected from outside world. Therefore security & privacy of sensitive data is one of the important issue. Our research focuses on the security & privacy of a digital video. The proposed research includes three parts, that is first one is H.264/AVC video encryption, second one is data embedding and third one is data extraction. This paper covers only first part i. H.264/AVC video encryption of our research. For encryption we used the RC4 algorithm. RC4 algorithm is a stream cipher & faster than block cipher algorithms. RC4 generates pseudorandom key stream & it is unintelligible without knowledge of input key thus it makes cryptanalytic attacks more difficult. We performs the encryption of video streams directly on the compressed domain & not during compression. Thus it preserves the compression & decompression time cycle. The experimental results shows the encryption of compressed video streams.