Security and protection architectures for large-scale content distribution

The Internet is increasingly being depended upon to provide large-scale content distribution. An important need is mechanisms to aid in the scalability of distribution services. These mechanisms include multicast, anycast, peer-to-peer, and overlay-based content distribution networks.; As content distribution on the Internet becomes more pervasive and the value of the content being distributed increases, the security of this content and its distribution channels has become a main concern of content creators, owners, and providers. There have been significant advances in maturing the distribution mechanisms; however, there are a number of distinct security issues in these technologies.; To address these problems, our research aims to develop flexible content protection architectures for large-scale content distribution. One focus of our research is the development of a content fingerprinting system that can provide theft deterrence in multicast and content distribution network environments while maintaining the scalability of these models. A second result of our work is a group access control architecture that addresses vulnerabilities that exist in multicast and anycast due to the open nature of the models. A third focus of our work is to develop a content protection architecture for decentralized peer-to-peer file-sharing systems where there is no central authority to enforce a security policy.