These days, a huge amount of content is available digitally, especially in the form of video. It is therefore important for content owners to protect their digital content. This book is concerned with securing digital video.

The book has 13 chapters. It begins with a very brief introduction, which provides an overview of the chapters that follow. The author highlights the need for preventing video piracy, and discusses tools and techniques that help secure digital video, including cryptography (which helps to encrypt digital content) and digital watermarking (which can be used to ensure authenticity). In today’s world, both software and hardware must be made tamper proof. The author describes mechanisms for making both software and hardware tamper resistant, and examines processes for prototyping content protection using various models. There is a brief account of existing video schemes. The book considers four ways of taking copyrighted video to homes (broadcast networks, broadband networks, mobile networks, and prerecorded media), and discusses ways of protecting content during the process of broadcasting.

The book takes a quick look at digital rights management (DRM), with an examination of Adobe Flash Access, Apple FairPlay, Windows Media DRM, and Microsoft DRM. It is important to protect prerecorded and recordable media such as DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. The book looks at some processes for achieving this, such as preventing the ripping of digital content from such media, content scrambling, and the use of techniques such as MagicGate (proposed by Sony). Nowadays, many devices are used in homes with several types of communication channels, including Wi-Fi, Ethernet, general packet radio service (GPRS), and universal serial bus (USB). Hence, it becomes important to protect information within home networks. The book surveys technologies such as digital transmission content protection (DTCP), high-bandwidth digital content protection (HDCP), and digital video broadcasting-content protection and copy management (DVB-CPCM) for this purpose. It describes some schemes for protecting digital cinema, and studies the problem of DRM interoperability. Various types of interoperability, current initiatives for achieving interoperability, and specific problems are mentioned. There is also an interesting chapter on some challenges in the field of securing digital video that includes a discussion of the use of game theory for DRM. The book concludes with a list of acronyms and a long and useful list of references.

The book is well written and timely, as content owners are struggling to protect their content and prevent loss of revenue. Much of the book is written in a manner suitable for novices to information security and content protection. The book will be useful for information security practitioners, researchers, faculty, students, and end users. Based on his rich research experience--he holds many patents in the field of digital content security--the author is well qualified to write this book. Although some of the topics could have been discussed in greater detail, I strongly recommend this book for its intended audience.