A Novel Format-Compliant Video Encryption Scheme for H.264/AVC Stream in Wireless Network

H.264/AVC media stream transmission is an important application in wireless network, but wireless network is an open network, the media security must be considered. The encryption approach which is used commonly for encryption of H.263/MPEG-4 stream can not be used for H.264/AVC´s directly, because the H.264/AVC stream data format is different from H.263/MPEG-4. Base on residual block spatial scrambling, a format-compliant, real-time and keep-length algorithm for H.264/AVC stream encryption is proposed. In the algorithm, the residual blocks are categorized into different groups and each residual block group uses different random shuffling table. The experimental results show that H.264/AVC video stream could be encrypted in real-time while the format is kept compliant, and the length of ciphertext is as same as the plaintext. So the proposed scheme is suitable for transmitting encrypted H.264/AVC stream through wireless network and can guarantee the security of the network.