A survey of video encryption algorithms

The popularity of multimedia applications is rapidly growing nowadays. The confidentiality of video communication is of primary concern for commercial usage, e.g. in video on demand services or business meetings. A variety of video encryption algorithms have been proposed in order to fulfill the specific requirements raised by the peculiarities of video communication. Video encryption algorithms can be classified according to their association with video compression into joint compression and encryption algorithms, and compression-independent encryption algorithms. From this classification perspective, we give a complete survey of the representative video encryption algorithms proposed so far and present their properties and limitations. We show by comparing and assessing the surveyed schemes that each scheme has its own strengths and weaknesses and no scheme can meet all specific requirements. Hence, video applications have to select an appropriate video encryption algorithm that meets their confidentiality requirements.