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Bitstream-Oriented Protection for the H.264/Scalable Video Coding (SVC)

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Abstract

The newly standardized H.264/SVC enable multimedia suppliers to provide video bitstream with temporal, spatial and quality scalabilities to meet various needs of end users. Its bitstream scalability characteristic is also especially suitable for multimedia applications under merged heterogeneous networks with different network protocols, capacities and throughputs. Although the network environment, to some extent, provides security protection against the illegal users, it is not enough to protect against the authorized users from digesting contents beyond its authorization. Hence the issue of content protection for the H.264/SVC has aroused researchers’ interests in recent years. In this paper, we present an efficient bitstream-oriented protection scheme for the H.264/SVC in a compression friendly and format compliant manner. The encryption is implemented on the Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) unit level. To improve the computational efficiency as well as to provide sufficient security, selective cryptographic algorithms with different computation cost are employed for different content level of SVC according to its significance. The I slice NAL units from the base layer of SVC bitstream are encrypted with the symmetric AES algorithm in Cipher Block Chaining mode. And the other NAL units are protected by simplified XOR cipher. Furthermore, a robust key management (key generation and distribution) mechanism is also discussed in this paper. The security analysis and simulation results further verify that the proposed methods can effectively protect the H.264/SVC bitstream at low computational cost.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Young Scholars Development Fund of SWPU (Nos. 201,699,010,009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Information Engineering, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, China

    Ting Ma

  2. Division of Communications Engineering, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Maode Ma & Yee Hui Lee

  3. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Feng Hu

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  1. Ting Ma
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  2. Maode Ma
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Correspondence to Ting Ma.

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Ma, T., Ma, M., Lee, Y.H. et al. Bitstream-Oriented Protection for the H.264/Scalable Video Coding (SVC). Wireless Pers Commun 97, 5115–5135 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-4771-5

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