WHIM: Watermarking Multicast Video with a
Hierarchy of Intermediaries
Paul Judge & Mostafa Ammar
Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract:
Fingerprinting, watermarking content to identify the recipient,
provides a good deterrence to unauthorized duplication and propagation of multimedia streams.
This is straightforward in a unicast environment; however,
in a multicast environment, inserting a fingerprint at the
source does not provide any security since many receivers
will share a common fingerprint. A simple solution would be
to fingerprint the data for each user at the source and unicast the
different streams. We aim to achieve a more scalable
solution while maintaining and even increasing the level of
security. To achieve this,we have developed WHIM, a scalable
system that allows multicast content to be marked with
distinct information for distinct receivers securely. This system
introduces two new concepts: 1)generating a watermark
based on the receiver's location in a tree overlaying the network
and 2)inserting the watermark in the content incrementally as it
traverses an overlay network. We propose
and evaluate several forms of this architecture and show
how it improves scalability while increasing security.