We have designed and implemented an authentication schemes for H.264/SVC streams, called svcAuth. svcAuth supports the full flexibility of SVC and allows verification of all possible substreams. In addition, it is designed for end-to-end authentication, in which only the content provider and the receiving devices need to be aware of the authentication mechanism. Therefore, when distributing multimedia streams in large scale over third-party Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), which contain proxies that may adapt scalable streams for different users, the proxies do not need to understand the authentication scheme, i.e., the authentication process and the authentication information embedded in streams are transparent; these information are embedded in SVC streams in a format-compliant manner.
svcAuth can be employed by any multimedia streaming application as a software/hardware add-on and without requiring any change to the encoders/decoders. Specifically, we add one authentication module to the provider side, which performs a post-processing on the encoded stream and embeds in it the information required for verification. At the receivers, we add a verification module, which verifies the received stream using the information embedded in it, and passes the verified stream to the player. Note that receivers who do not have the verification module and do not support the svcAuth authentication scheme can still receiver and decode the streams, since the scheme is transparent. Our current implementation of these modules is available as an open-source library, which is implemented in Java for easy portability to various platforms. By using the svcAuth library, all users with anytime-anywhere demand for multimedia streams can always ensure that the content they watch is original and has not gone under any malicious manipulation.
svcAuth is an ongoing project its software is continuously improved. The latest version of the svcAuth software can be accessed through our subversion system at our subversion server. It is released under GPLv3.
