A real-time ciphering transcoder for H.264 and HEVC streams

This paper presents a novel approach for real-time encryption of both H.264 and HEVC encoded streams. Our method relies on structure-preserving Selective Encryption (SE) managed by a symmetric ciphering/deciphering transcoder. Developped as an autonomous tool, it can be implemented within any existing software and hardware architecture and requires very low computational cost. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) manages the encryption step to guarantee the protection of encrypted streams. Our method preserves source format and overall bitrate, which ensures undetectable ciphering and suitability for streaming over heterogeneous networks. Experimental evaluation of our proposed transcoder is provided in this paper and a demonstrator of an implementation on a mobile device will support these theoretical results.