One of the companies we shall be talking to at IBC this year is a Norwegian start up called Secustream Technologies, but its secret was announced this week, a new way to protect digital streaming, called SecuShow.
SecuShow assigns a series of completely random media keys to each second of digital content being streamed via PCs, over IPTV or on any other pay-per-view or on-demand system.
SecuShow access keys have no relationship to each other and are not derived from a single prime number or any of the other standard ways of creating encryption keys. Instead they are random and must be separately sent over a low bandwidth connection from a security server.
“We looked at the source of today’s digital-rights-management headaches ‘ automated attacks ‘ and set out to solve that problem,” said Gisle Ostereng, Secustream founder and CEO. “SecuShow provides unique protection for each second of content playback, making it incredibly time-consuming to break. It would be like one thief having to break into a thousand different banks with a thousand different security systems, instead of one bank with one system.” Were not so sure about that. we presume that the keys are encrypted, so what happens if the key which decrypts them is stolen. If the keys are not encrypted, why not just store them and replay them with stolen material.
SecuShow is currently in customer trials, and the company is exploring further partnerships in the PC, broadcast and IPTV spaces and supports most video formats and encryption algorithms, and Windows, Apple and Linux data formats. Of course it does imply that a device has to be permanently connected to a data network, which means it will have limited applications. We’ll let you know more when we meet them.