Video On Demand System Security Policy Research

Video On Demand (VOD) is growing up rapidly with great progress of Digital TV. It has become one of the most important services of CATV (Cable Television). Under the background of double-direction HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coaxial) network upgrading, the size and development of VOD improved greatly. VOD services are running at lots of CATV of China. We can believe, within a short time, VOD will appear in everyone's family.This paper is about the security policy of VOD. As a new production, VOD don't have sufficient time of running at inland China. Technology is not sophisticated. Experience is not enough. About security, it mostly relies on original way of Digital TV. Now it needs utility of high level security technologies. At the same time, for protection of asset copyrights, relative laws and rules are lack and consciousness of copyrights is weak. These make a great challenge to VOD. This paper is trying to introduce a new method, a new thought, a new technology using in my job. 1 would like share it to all of you.Now to protect VOD system, it mostly uses "Access Control + Smart Card". Access Control has been used for a long time with high reliability and low cost. So in most CATV environment, like for channel encryption, Access Control was employed widely. When VOD and Online Shopping go into the stage, old security policy was still being used. CATV operator mainly uses Access Control to protect VOD, just add some additional interface. But VOD itself has special characteristic like digital copyrights, it look like Access Control + Smart Card is not enough. This paper point out a new security policy based on digital copyrights management, it much better suit for VOD environment.Video On Demand is a complex system, it involve storage, networking, identification certification and copyrights management etc. Wish DRM can provide useful thought for research and operation of VOD. Wish DRM can do more contribution for our copyrights protection.