IDRM · Interoperable rights Management over DRM Platforms

Final Activity Report Summary - IDRM (Interoperable Rights Management over DRM Platforms)

The major objective of the proposed work of this Marie-Curie initiative was to study and develop mechanisms to allow the different Digital Rights Management solutions to interoperate. During the project timeframe the researcher has conducted an important effort to identify some mechanisms that could make the rights management interoperability possible. The DRM interoperability problem is a vast and broad problem. Therefore the work has been focused on some specific and relevant areas. During this project, the researcher has performed an in-depth study of the currently available DRM solutions and in particular those initiatives that consider interoperability as one of their main objectives. This work analysed the different rights management solutions (Digital Media Project, MPEG-21, Coral Consortium, Open Mobile Alliance DRM, Sun DReaM, AXMEDIS/MIPAMS and others) and how they addressed the interoperability problems. The work was primarily focused on the DRM initiatives that adopted an open approach (either their specifications are freely available or their source-code is available). The work conducted on this fellowship focused on the following aspects: - To study the applicability of service-oriented architectures and web-services on the design of interoperable services for rights management processes. This is important because the different components of the different rights management systems can interface with each other through a common interface and therefore improve the overall interoperability between the different services. - Analysis of the complexity of the different rights management systems in the establishment of the authentication and trust environments, and designing and defining a method, based on Public-Key Infra-structures (PKI) and brokerage mechanisms to create trust environments between different rights management solutions, therefore increasing the interoperability among them. - Design and development of an open-source distributed service-based rights management platform that will enable interoperability between the different services of the content value-chain. This platform is content agnostic and independent of the business model, and can be used to test and deploy different governed digital content business scenarios. Moreover, this is an open platform that provides public open interfaces for interoperating with other existing rights management platforms. - Creation of an interoperability mechanism that will enable the different content rendering applications to interoperate through a common interoperable rights management middle-ware. This will enable the different content rendering mechanisms to abstract from the complexities of the rights management mechanisms, while using digital governed content. This mechanism will allow a de-coupling between the content rendering application and the rights management system, through an abstraction layer capable of handling the rights clearance on behalf of the rendering application. - Identify the specific DRM processes that handle key management and license management. During this phase a generic framework for secure license and key management process for DRM has been defined. During this stage, the necessary requirements for secure license and key management have been identified and have been taken into account in the definition of the generic process. The work conducted during the Marie-Curie timeframe was properly disseminated either internally in the hosting institution and research group, but also externally through several papers in journals, and some communications on scientific events.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union