Selective Encryption of Multimedia Content in Distribution Networks: Challenges and New Directions

The security of multimedia data in digital distribution networks is commonly provided by encryption, i.e., the mathematical process that transforms a plaintext message into unintelligible ciphertext. Nevertheless, the classical and modern ciphers have all been developed for the simplest form of multimedia data, i.e., text, and are not appropriate for higher forms such as images and video with very large file sizes. Selective encryption is a recent approach to reduce the computational requirements for huge volumes of multimedia data in distribution networks with different client device capabilities. In this paper, we provide a survey and classification of the proposed schemes, discuss the current issues and present some future directions.