Secure mutual authentication for IPTV broadcasting

IPTV is an emerging technology that combines both broadcasting and telecommunication. In the digital contents distribution environment, a user authentication is an important security primitive which allows only authenticated user to use the provided service by checking the validity of the membership. This paper presents a secure mutual authentication and key exchange scheme between STB and smart card for the IPTV broadcasting. Each user is authenticated using a subset of attributes which are issued in the registration phase without revealing his/her identity. Security and efficiency analyses prove that the proposed scheme is strong against common threats in the IPTV environment.