Hierarchical Key Management of Scalable Video Coding

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is a new video coding standard with high efficiency and scalability. The digital right management (DRM) system for SVC should exploit the scalability and be easy to operate. Currently, there is no such a key management scheme for DRM system of SVC. Hence in this paper, a hierarchical key management scheme is proposed. Corresponding to the three scalabilities of SVC (temporal, spatial and quality), we introduce a key management scheme with symmetric cryptographic algorithm and three-dimensional key derivation. This approach is proved to prevent various types of attackers, and the communication efficiency is higher than direct key distribution scheme.