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A practical key management and distribution system for IPTV conditional access
Conditional Access (CA) is widely used by pay-television operators to restrict access to content to authorised subscribers. Commercial CA solutions are available for structured broadcast and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) environments, as well as Internet-based video-on-demand services, however...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Department of Computer Science
2014
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| _version_ | 1867613218879307776 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Harding, Gregory Leighton |
| author2 | Kayem, Anne |
| author_browse | Harding, Gregory Leighton Kayem, Anne |
| author_facet | Kayem, Anne Harding, Gregory Leighton |
| author_sort | Harding, Gregory Leighton |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | Conditional Access (CA) is widely used by pay-television operators to restrict access to content to authorised subscribers. Commercial CA solutions are available for structured broadcast and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) environments, as well as Internet-based video-on-demand services, however these solutions are mostly proprietary, often inefficient for use on IP networks, and frequently depend on smartcards for maintaining security. An efficient, exible, and open conditional access system that can be implemented practically by operators with large numbers of subscribers would be beneficial to those operators and Set-Top-Box manufacturers in terms of cost savings for royalties and production costs. Furthermore, organisations such as the South African Broadcasting Corporation that are transitioning to Digital-Terrestrial-Television could use an open Conditional Access System (CAS) to restrict content to viewing within national borders and to ensure that only valid TV licence holders are able to access content. To this end, a system was developed that draws from the area of group key management. Users are grouped according to their subscription selections and these groups are authorised for each selection's constituent services. Group keys are updated with a key-tree based approach that includes a novel method for growing full trees that outperforms the standard method. The relations that are created between key trees are used to establish a hierarchy of keys which allows exible selection of services whilst maintaining their cryptographic protection. Conditions for security without dependence on smartcards are defined, and the system is expandable to multi-home viewing scenarios. A prototype implementation was used to assess the proposed system. Total memory consumption of the key-server, bandwidth usage for transmission of key updates, and client processing and storage of keys were all demonstrated to be highly scalable with number of subscribers and number of services. |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/6644 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:32:39.476Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2014 |
| publishDateRange | 2014 |
| publishDateSort | 2014 |
| publisher | Department of Computer Science |
| publisherStr | Department of Computer Science |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/6644 A practical key management and distribution system for IPTV conditional access Harding, Gregory Leighton Kayem, Anne Conditional Access (CA) is widely used by pay-television operators to restrict access to content to authorised subscribers. Commercial CA solutions are available for structured broadcast and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) environments, as well as Internet-based video-on-demand services, however these solutions are mostly proprietary, often inefficient for use on IP networks, and frequently depend on smartcards for maintaining security. An efficient, exible, and open conditional access system that can be implemented practically by operators with large numbers of subscribers would be beneficial to those operators and Set-Top-Box manufacturers in terms of cost savings for royalties and production costs. Furthermore, organisations such as the South African Broadcasting Corporation that are transitioning to Digital-Terrestrial-Television could use an open Conditional Access System (CAS) to restrict content to viewing within national borders and to ensure that only valid TV licence holders are able to access content. To this end, a system was developed that draws from the area of group key management. Users are grouped according to their subscription selections and these groups are authorised for each selection's constituent services. Group keys are updated with a key-tree based approach that includes a novel method for growing full trees that outperforms the standard method. The relations that are created between key trees are used to establish a hierarchy of keys which allows exible selection of services whilst maintaining their cryptographic protection. Conditions for security without dependence on smartcards are defined, and the system is expandable to multi-home viewing scenarios. A prototype implementation was used to assess the proposed system. Total memory consumption of the key-server, bandwidth usage for transmission of key updates, and client processing and storage of keys were all demonstrated to be highly scalable with number of subscribers and number of services. 2014-08-20T19:42:00Z 2014-08-20T19:42:00Z 2013 Master Thesis Masters MPhil http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6644 eng application/pdf Department of Computer Science Faculty of Science University of Cape Town |
| spellingShingle | Harding, Gregory Leighton A practical key management and distribution system for IPTV conditional access |
| thesis_degree_str | Master's |
| title | A practical key management and distribution system for IPTV conditional access |
| title_full | A practical key management and distribution system for IPTV conditional access |
| title_fullStr | A practical key management and distribution system for IPTV conditional access |
| title_full_unstemmed | A practical key management and distribution system for IPTV conditional access |
| title_short | A practical key management and distribution system for IPTV conditional access |
| title_sort | practical key management and distribution system for iptv conditional access |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6644 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT hardinggregoryleighton apracticalkeymanagementanddistributionsystemforiptvconditionalaccess AT hardinggregoryleighton practicalkeymanagementanddistributionsystemforiptvconditionalaccess |