On scalable encryption for mobile consumer multimedia applications

Advances in wireless communication and mobile computing and networking are providing us with growing business opportunities and demands for multimedia services. Consumer networks, increasingly used for multimedia information and commercial content delivery, are destined to be heterogeneous. Meanwhile, for many multimedia services, security is an important component to restrict unauthorized content access and distribution. This suggests the need for new cryptography system implementations that can operate at different data rates, i.e., be scaled to various multimedia content, different network topology, changing bandwidth, and diverse device capabilities. Encryption is used to ensure confidentiality of messages in communication. Conventional encryption schemes do not offer suitable scalability for this new set of applications. In this paper, we describe scalable encryption, discuss the applications for consumer multimedia access, present scalable encryption schemes that support various kinds of scalability, and present a scalable content access scheme using an algebraic based differentiable-decryption key public key crypto algorithm.