Achieving end-to-end authentication in intermediary-enabled multimedia delivery systems

Considerable research and experiment results in recent years have shown that the server-proxy-user architecture represents an efficient and scalable new paradigm for multimedia content delivery. However, not much effort has been spent on the security issues in such systems. In this paper, we study data authentication in multimedia content delivery, and in particular, we focus on achieving end-to-end authentication from the multimedia server to end users in the server-proxy-user architecture where intermediary proxies transcode multimedia content dynamically. We present a formal model for the end-to-end authentication problem, and propose a basic construction for generic data modality and prove its security. We further extend and tailor our basic technique to authenticate specific multimedia format, JPEG2000 code-streams.