A Biometric-Based Authentication and Anonymity Scheme for Digital Rights Management System

Abstract

Due to the rapid development of computer technologies, many traditional contents have been digitized, adding to the immensity of digital contents. Through the Internet, various digital contents can be accessed and spread all over the world within the snap of a finger. However, such amazing swiftness and convenience have also brought various kinds of data security, privacy and copyright protection issues. Digital rights management (DRM) systems are access control technologies used to restrict the use, modification, and distribution of protected digital contents. The success of a DRM system relies heavily on a good user authentication mechanism, and user identity verification through biometric information check is a great idea in that the biological characteristics are unique to each user and that such a mechanism releases the user of the trouble of keeping the login info safe from being stolen or mistaken or forgotten. On the other hand, in response to modern people’s prevalent use of mobile devices, DRM systems should also support mobile digital content access. In this paper, we shall propose a novel biometric-based authentication and anonymity scheme for DRM system. To develop our new scheme, we have carefully studied Jung et al.'s scheme, a biometric-based protocol whose architecture is similar to that of a DRM system but not quite the same, and modified it to fit the requirements of a DRM system environment. Our correctness check, security analysis, and performance evaluation have proved the superiority of our new scheme over related schemes.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.47.2.18506