An Access Control System for Multimedia Content Distribution

Multimedia content distribution has appeared as a new growth market offered by network providers, defining resource access infrastructures able to support both wired and wireless accesses. Although these infrastructures have been widely studied in the last years, the main aim of those works has been focused more on the distribution process than on a suitable security infrastructure to protect that content. Therefore, the study of security systems able to offer authentication, authorization and other security-related requirements for those kinds of scenarios is still an open research field. In this paper, we propose a new scheme which takes advantage of a previously existing underlying authorization infrastructure among the involved organizations, the NAS-SAML system, to build a multimedia content distribution with an advanced and extensible authorization mechanism. The target scenario is the one proposed by the VIDIOS project, which defines an architecture for multimedia transmissions across error prone networks such as Internet backbones and mobile access networks.