Computation time efficient approach for licenses validation in DRM systems

• Authors: Amit Sachan;Sabu Emmanuel
• Venue: Multimedia Tools and Applications
• Year: 2013

Digital rights management (DRM) systems are employed to securely deliver the digital contents from owners/creators to consumers. Often multiple middle level distributors are involved in the distribution process. Initially, the owner issues redistribution licenses to its distributors. The distributors in turn using their received redistribution licenses can issue new redistribution licenses to other distributors and usage licenses to consumers. However, distributors may be involved in violation of the rights given to them in redistribution licenses. Thus, for the rights violation detection, these newly issued licenses must be validated against the received redistribution licenses. The validation becomes complex when there exist multiple redistribution licenses for contents. Then it requires validation using an exponential number of validation inequalities and each inequality may contain up to an exponential number of summation terms. This makes the validation process computationally intensive and necessitates to do the validation efficiently. Thus, in this paper, we propose a method to reduce the validation time by deriving a relationship between different validation inequalities and then designing a data structure to do efficient validation using the derived relationship. The theoretical and experimental analysis show that the proposed method can do the validation efficiently as compared to the other existing approaches for the validation.