Mobile Agent-Based Digital Rights Management Scheme

Abstract

In the paper, we introduce a mobile software agent-based scheme for digital rights management targeted for personal mobile devices. The goal of the proposed scheme is to provide a solution secure yet simple to implement and maintain for controlled consumption of digital media objects. In order to protect the digital content in transport and to prevent non-authorized use, we apply a combination of a threshold scheme, one-time password system, key agreement protocol, and clueless mobile agents. Here, every participating software agent receives a share from a dealer and only the end user is able to decrypt the DRM content after gathering all the shares. Clueless mobile agents traveling between the participants' sites do the distribution and the gathering of the shares. The proposed DRM scheme is compared to the industry-leading Open Mobile Alliance's digital rights management specification and their applicability and the differences are thoroughly discussed. Finally, we evaluate the weaknesses of the scheme and propose few variants satisfying different security requirements.