MPEG video encryption algorithms

Multimedia data security is important for multimedia commerce. Previous cryptography studies have focused on text data. The encryption algorithms developed to secure text data may not be suitable to multimedia applications because of the large data size and real time constraint. For multimedia applications, light weight encryption algorithms are attractive. We present four fast MPEG video encryption algorithms. These algorithms use a secret key to randomly change the sign bits of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients and/or the sign bits of motion vectors. The encryption is accomplished by the inverse DCT (IDCT) during the MPEG video decompression processing. These algorithms add a small overhead to MPEG codec. Software implementations are fast enough to meet the real time requirement of MPEG video applications. The experimental results show that these algorithms achieve satisfactory results. They can be used to secure video-on-demand, video conferencing, and video email applications.