Canvid - Video Conferencing and Video Compression Specialists

Canvid Digital Rights Management Whitepaper

Security Process:

A hash of uniquely identifying information is taken from the machine of the user purchasing digital media and is used to generate the security keys with which the media is encrypted. The security keys for the encryption algorithms are generated uniquely to each end user’s computer system. Since no two machines will produce the same hash of information, no two machines will produce the same security keys and thus there is no way to play a file encrypted for a particular machine on another machine. To further add to the uniqueness of the security keys, random information is added to the process of key generation. This ensures that each download that a user makes which is encrypted with Canvid DRM protected media will use different encryption keys. Even if the user downloads the same file twice the encryption key will be different. This eliminates a potential vulnerability of encryption by not re-using keys.

The audio format preserves the original quality of the DVD audio. The quality of the encrypted audio is not affected by the encryption process and no further lossy compression is employed than what the original DVD creator employed, thus preserving the clarity of the DVD recording while protecting the digital content from piracy.

The audio and video formats are unrelated to each other and are not dependent on one another. The audio and video streams are encrypted separately and independently. The same algorithms and uniquely generated keys are used to encrypt both streams independently.

The decryption of the audio and video occurs only in memory during the playback of the media and no decrypted data is written to disk at any time nor is more decrypted than is necessary for the immediate playback of the current position.

Certain key information about the rightful purchaser of a file is encrypted into the file using an arbitrary key to identify it so that if files are passed around the net, the Canvid system will be able to tell who is the rightful purchaser.

Pros:

• Encryption algorithms are well researched and tested

• Each key is unique

• System hash information used in key generation should be unique (i.e. no two systems should generate the same hash information and therefore keys will be different and files will only play on the machine they were downloaded to)

• Audio quality is as pure as the encoding of the DVD since it is a perfect copy of the DVD data.

• The encryption algorithms can be changed at will so long as they are easy to work with, fit the model, and execute fast enough to be a practical choice.

• The implementation of the encryption allows seeking in the media.

• The audio and video streams are encrypted independently of each other and could use different algorithms and keys if desired.

• The encrypted file’s header is changed to reflect new four character codes for choice of playback filters so only the Canvid-Audio and Canvid-Video filters will be chosen by media player.

• A file’s owner is identifiable from the file.

• The decryption occurs at the time of decoding in the same code so that there is no intermediate stage at which the decrypted data could be easily intercepted and written to a new file.