Anonymous trust: Digital rights management using broadcast encryption

Broadcast encryption is an active area of cryptographic research. Originally defined by Fiat and Naor, broadcast encryption refers to key management schemes that operate when the participating parties do not have a two-way communication path. We contrast that with public-key cryptography: all known public-key protocols require a handshake to establish a common key. We extend the use of broadcast encryption to solve problems that have been traditionally addressed by public-key cryptography: we discuss the xCP Cluster Protocol, a proposed digital rights management (DRM) system for the home entertainment network, and we illustrate a broadcast-encryption-based content distribution system, which can work without requiring any secrets in the DRM client. © 2004 IEEE.