When you upload a premium course video, music video, or confidential corporate video, you surely wouldn’t want unauthorized people to access confidential company information. This is where “Video Encryption” technology comes into action for video protection.
Video encryption is a process of digitally protecting or securing your videos to prevent unwanted interception and viewing of the transmitted videos. The process of video protection involves encrypting videos using specific software, hardware setup to secure your sensitive digital content.
Common techniques for video encryption.
Anti-theft chain: strictly speaking, this does not belong to video encryption, but only to prevent downloading. The significance is not great, at most some header, refer restrictions, or add some token, or get on the multi-segment loading; but there is always a way to download, this does not belong to the category of encryption, so we will not start to discuss.
Second, based on Microsoft DRM SDK, or online public drm program, such as rtmpe/ hls encryption program, etc..
Roughly speaking, they are separated as follows
- Microsoft DRM SDK, this is a more common scheme in the windows era, but now the disadvantages are obvious, one is that Microsoft’s sdk now requires higher fees and cycles to apply; the other is that, in the mobile era, there are too many disadvantages of this model, such as the support of various mobile phone users, the supported video formats, etc.
- HLS encryption, that is, the ts data inside m3u8 are encrypted, and then when the browser or player plays, through the built-in decryption secret key address inside m3u8, to dynamically decrypt. This is relatively simple to implement, but there is also a disadvantage, that is, the common problem of using public encryption standards in this category.
Privatization solutions: For example, our company is providing personalized encryption solutions for various online education and other customers, each different customer uses different encryption algorithms and encryption ideas, which can enhance the security of encryption.
How does video encryption work?
(A) video can be encrypted at the frame level, such as each data key frame, from the binary to do encryption operations, encryption algorithm of course can not be public; best different customers with different encryption algorithms, or do deformation, to ensure that a customer is cracked, another customer is safe; and encryption is best to have a version number mechanism, after cracking can be upgraded, you break my defense, to maintain regular updates.
B) One of the weaknesses of encryption is actually in the playback, for example, many peers use flash player to play encrypted videos. flash is very easy to reverse, your decryption code is reversed and then seen, then your decryption code can be used to decrypt the video. Of course, the industry can also consider the use of FlashCC technology, which means that the C++ code is compiled and embedded in flash, but we can tell you: in order to strengthen the research of encryption technology, we have made a spear product to test this kind of encryption technology, our point amount of video parsing, can decrypt the video address encryption algorithm of major mainstream video sites, many of which use This tells us that FlashCC technology alone is not secure. To see whether a company’s product has a high encryption level, he must first have a high cracking ability, otherwise he can only make what he thinks is unbreakable. So FlashCC is the way to go, but it can’t just be FlashCC.
C) Consider video encryption also needs to consider compatibility, such as PC side, mobile app, etc. Often the breakthrough is in a weak entry point, so it must be that every entry point is secure. Our encryption under PC and mobile APP are all using self-developed players with multiple encryption built in. Of course, some customers do not need the mobile APP and wish to use only H5, such, we use different encryption methods, because the security level of HLS is a little weaker, so we use different encryption, even if such is used, it does not affect the security of other videos and customers. The above are some of the commonly used optional options for video encryption.
