EC-GATE: An Infrastructure for DRM
Antonio Mana, Mariemma I. Yague, Vicente Benjumea
Abstract
DRM technologies include a range of functions to support the
management of intellectual property for digital resources, such as
expression of rights and obligations, description, identification,
trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of digital content. This
paper presents the EC-GATE system, a general framework capable of
supporting very heterogeneous DRM applications and scenarios. This
system enables content owners to enforce access control policies,
copyright agreements, payments and other obligations, to digital
objects in a distributed environment. The idea of this work is that
the security requirements of all processes related to the secure
transmission and commerce of digital contents can be fulfilled if we
guarantee that the software running at the other side of the
communication line is protected. To achieve what we call "protected
software" we must ensure that it is neither possible to discover nor
to alter the function that the software performs and it is also
impossible to impersonate the software. The solution that we present
is also based on the notion of "secure container", a protected package
of data and administrative information. Our solution uses mobile
software elements to convey the protected contents and force the user
to fulfill the obligations previously established by the content owner
before granting the rights and access to these contents. EC-GATE also
includes components for authorization and management.
Keywords: Authorization, Access control, DRM