Security Attributes Based Digital Rights Management

ost real-life systems delegate responsibilities to di�erent authorities. We apply this model to a dig- ital rights management system, to achieve exible security. In our model a hierarchy of authorities issues certi�cates that are linked by cryptographic means. This linkage establishes a chain of control, identity-attribute-rights, and allows exible rights control over content. Typical security objectives, such as identi�cation, authentication, authoriza- tion and access control can be realised. Content keys are personalised to detect illegal super distri- bution. We describe a working prototype, which we develop using standard techniques, such as stan- dard certi�cates, XML and Java. We present ex- perimental results to evaluate the scalability of the system. A formal analysis demonstrates that our design is able to detect a form of illegal super dis- tribution.