Layered video encryption utilizing error propagation in H.264/AVC

Video encryption is widely used to guarantee security, which is increasingly important with the development of network and multimedia technologies. However, most conventional encryption schemes all act on the entire frame, and they cannot satisfy different application needs such as security, speed, etc., simultaneously. Actually, the strong error propagation property in H.264/AVC makes it possible to distort the video with less computational complexity. In this paper, a layered video encryption framework is proposed to supply different security and speed levels, which fully utilize the error propagation in H.264/AVC. Most encryption methods are applicable to this framework. We implement a prototype based on one of the latest encryption methods to evaluate the framework. Experiments show that the proposed framework permits different security and speed levels, which is attractive for most applications, especially for the ones in server-end computing and future mobile devices.