A methodology to enhance media policing over IMS Networks

Abstract

The rapid spread of IP-based access technologies as well as the move towards core network convergence with IMS has led to an explosion in multimedia content delivery across packet networks. Although this transition has led to a much wider and richer service experience, there is also increased concern related to media protection and secure delivery of content that is sent over networks in digital form. There are many efforts ongoing to address this area of DRM in a converged world. The open mobile alliance has probably the most comprehensive approach to this with the recent release of the DRM V2.0 pre-release. Enhanced key management is the most powerful introduction in OMA DRM 2.0 which is used in the trust and security model providing authentication both at user equipment and the application server filling in the gaps of DRM 1.0. The main drawback is the assumption that all DRM agents on the user equipment are well-behaved. This paper proposes a novel method of enabling an added level of security and media protection before the media gets played by an application on the user equipment. This is addition to the current key management paradigm. The paper lays out the changes in network infrastructure, both on the client as well as server side, required to enable this. It addresses issues of scalability and performance that are required in a mass-deployed service provider based setup, and demonstrates how the proposed solution would not adversely affect these quality parameters