Secure media content distribution based on the improved set-top box in IPTV

In this paper, some means are proposed to improve the performances of the set-top box (STB) based media distribution schemes for IPTV. Firstly, the lightweight packet encryption is used to replace traditional complete encryption in order to reduce the time cost. Secondly, a method is introduced to form a unique customer code and generates a unique media copy for each customer in order to trace illegal redistributors. Thirdly, the desynchronization operations are introduced to make different copies in order to resist collusion attacks. Analyses and experiments show that the proposed packet encryption saves much time cost compared with traditional encryption and the saved time cost is enough for the added new operations. Additionally, the produced media copy is different from each other, and their collusion will generate a copy with much degradation, which can resist the content leakage from the gap between STB and TV set.