A Novel Approach to DRM Systems

Modern digital rights management (DRM) systems are often developed as Web software platforms designed as service oriented architectures composed of a federation of coordinated Web entities that play distinct roles and dynamically interact within a trusted environment. Such a design approach requires that trust relationships have to be dynamically established across multiple and heterogeneous organizational boundaries so as to facilitate an "on-the-fly" resource sharing. This introduces non-trivial security architectural requirements concerning with the mechanisms that allow different security realms of Web entities to be federated. This paper presents a DRM system developed as a Web software platform designed to give a specific support both to the interaction of the Web entities involved in the platform and to the development of the trusted relationships among them, in a much more flexible way than before, dynamically and with minimal overheads and shared infrastructure.