An efficient right-granting model with hierarchical group rights for large-scale content distribution

The goal of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology is to distribute digital contents in a secure manner that can protect and manage the rights for all participants in contents distribution value-chain including producers, providers, distributors, and consumers. In most existing DRM schemes, rights are granted per content to a consumer, and all the right-granting information including consumer identifier, content identifier, content decryption key and usage rules are tightly related and stored in the license. However, these schemes cause the problems that the license management will become complicated in proportion to increasing the number of contents or consumers, especially in large-scale content distribution scenarios. In this paper, we propose an efficient Right-granting Model with Hierarchical Group Rights (RMHGR) which can grant rights on some group of contents to a group of consumers. Furthermore, we propose a corresponding DRM system model which differs from previous DRM systems in terms of packaging mechanism, license structure, and content decryption key generation method. A comparison with other DRM schemes has shown that our proposed scheme is low overhead, scalable, and efficient for large-scale content distribution.