Computational Efficient Authenticated Digital Content Distribution Frameworks for DRM Systems: Review and Outlook

Advancement in digital technologies presents a user-friendly environment for the digital content distribution. However, it makes digital content prone to piracy issues. Digital rights management (DRM) systems aim to ensure the authorized content usage. As the digital content broadcasts through the public network, a secure and authorized content access mechanism is required. As digital media users are increasing, data centers draw vast amounts of power to manage consumer demands for instant access. Thus, design of efficient protocols is required for digital industry. Several authenticated content key distribution frameworks have been introduced for DRM systems to support efficient computing and mutual authentication. The main focus of recent devolvement is security and energy consumption by increasing communication and computing efficiency. Most of the existing DRM models efficiently address the consumer concerns and make the system user-friendly and computationally efficient. Thus, it is essential to analyze the security, efficiency, and related issues in the existing framework before adopting them for a DRM system. This article presents a study on the existing authenticated content key distribution frameworks of DRM systems. It proves the vulnerabilities of the existing structures against known attacks and challenges in their implementation. It also discusses the desirable attributes of DRM systems and provides possible future direction.