Group-Based Authentication to Protect Digital Content for Business Applications

Over the past several years, several high profile cases involving intellectual property copyright violations have brought the issue of digital content protection to the forefront of public attention. In most business enterprises, teamwork project members are dynamically organized into a group from which they can then retrieve relevant documents by participating in discussion. In this paper, we propose an efficient group-based authorized DRM system to solve this problem. We present efficient digital content protection and practical management architecture for use in business applications. Public key cryptosystems, symmetric cryptosystems, secret sharing mechanisms, one-way hash functions, and digital signatures are integrated into our scheme. Any business enterprise can thus use our system to limit access to only those with proper authorization. Moreover, persistent protection, integrity, authentication, tracking usage of DRM work, portability, and practicability are assured. Our scheme lends itself to the goals of many businesses by effectively protecting digital content.