WHIM: watermarking multicast video with a hierarchy of intermediaries

  • Authors:
  • Paul Judge;Mostafa Ammar

  • Affiliations:
  • Networking and Telecommunications Group, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 801 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA;Networking and Telecommunications Group, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 801 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA

  • Venue:
  • Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Fingerprinting, watermarking content to identify the recipient, provides a good deterrence to unauthorized duplication and propagation of multimedia streams. This is straightforward in a unicast environment; however, in a multicast environment, inserting a fingerprint at the source does not provide any security since many receivers will share a common fingerprint. A simple solution would be to fingerprint the data for each user at the source and unicast the different streams. We aim to achieve a more scalable solution while maintaining and even increasing the level of security. To achieve this, we have developed WHIM, a scalable system that allows multicast content to be marked with distinct information for distinct receivers securely. This system introduces two new concepts: (1) generating a watermark based on the receiver's location in a tree overlaying the network and (2) inserting the watermark in the content incrementally as it traverses an overlay network. We propose and evaluate several forms of this architecture and show how it improves scalability while increasing security.