Authentication and Key Management Based on Kerberos for M2M Mobile Open IPTV Security

Openness has been added to IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) services in order for users not only to receive, but also to provide them. Open IPTV is expected to bring about great changes in the IPTV service area. Recently, mobility has also been added. However, because of its openness and IP network characteristics, security is one of the major issues hindering its commercialization. For IPTV, several security mechanisms for user authentication and content protection have been proposed to make the service reliable. However, these traditional security mechanisms cannot be adopted in the mobile IPTV area, because the security and system performance are influenced by numerous factors in the many-to-many environments. In our work, we propose a mechanism for secure user authentication and key distribution based on Kerberos for mobile open IPTV. Our proposal provides an efficient authentication process and the secure transmission of content among users, and further decreases the authentication time compared with that of other mechanisms.