Protecting adaptive multimedia delivery and adaptation using proxy based approach

By breaking the end-to-end nature of the communication, proxies render the task of providing end-to-end security much harder or even impossible in some cases. In this paper, we will address the questions of when and how end-to-end security, like confidentiality and authenticity can be preserved, in a multimedia content delivery platform, when having one or more adaptation proxies in the data path. We describe SEMAFOR, a platform for protecting adaptive multimedia content delivery in heterogeneous environments. SEMAFOR aims to deliver an end-to-end authenticity of original content exchanged in a heterogeneous network while allowing content adaptation by intermediary proxies between the content transmitter and the final users. Adaptation and authentication management are done by the intermediary proxies, transparently to connected hosts, which totally make abstraction of these processes. SEMAFOR provides AMCA a new content authentication based on multi-hop signature scheme using a Merkle Hash Tree, and XSST a secured transaction protocol that gives securely exchanges of transactions in SEMAFOR.