Abstract of

'Trusted Watermarks'

The Internet becomes more and more integrated into everyday life these days. Reasons may be increasing data transfer rates and decreasing connection fees. Increasing data transfer rates on the client-side cause a widespread usage of peer-to-peer techniques that balance network load between servers and clients. Especially when distributing content to a multitude of customers, usage of peer-to-peer mechanisms comes in handy. Another main impact of the Internet nowadays is an increasing appetite for on-demand content which leads to entertainment devices providing customers with on-demand media from the Internet in their living rooms. Furthermore uprising media-deployment results in an arising demand for theft-protection by the holders of copyrights. Nevertheless past showed that copyright protection methods that restrict the user in being able to playback acquired media without difficulty cause decreasing sales figures. Thus customer-friendly copyright-protection methods seem to bridge the gap between customer's and supplier's needs. Moreover one major problem in the growing usage of software implemented algorithms in embedded systems, like on-demand entertainment-devices, is the ability of customers to modify their devices in order to reveal secret data or to bypass copyrightprotection providing methods. Integrity-proving mechanisms that ensure devices are being unaltered are required accordingly. This paper presents a concept for a so called Trusted Set- Top-Box (TSTB) that will make use of peer-to-peer file sharing mechanisms to provide the customer with real-time and ondemand video streaming. To protect copyrighted video material from theft in a customer-friendly manner, novel watermarkingtechnology will be used. This allows for unproblematic playback of acquired media on distinct playback devices. The TSTB is referenced to be trusted since TPM-Technology will serve as security anchor, providing methods for attesting the devices' integrity. Through this unauthorized modification of the device will be detected.