It is well known that media data over wireless links is more vulnerable to illegal access and modification due to their open air access operating mode. Wireless links are fundamentally different from the wired communications in several key operation aspects, including limited bandwidth as well as time-varying and error prone channel conditions. As a result, conventional secure data communication schemes cannot be readily applied to secure media over mobile wireless networks. In wireless networks, transmission errors such as packet loss and bit errors are inevitable due to ambient interferences and open air operation mode. Furthermore, media transmission is also fundamentally different from the generic data communication in that media content integrity, rather than the data stream integrity, needs to be preserved during the transmission. For example, when authenticating media for wireless networks, the semantic meaning of the media data, instead of the entirety of the data, needs to be verified.
In this talk, various challenges in secure multimedia over mobile wireless networks beyond reliable transmission will be presented. In particular, examples in multimedia encryption and multimedia authentication over wireless links will be discussed in detail. Some contemporary solutions to these challenges, such as encryption of scalable video and joint sourcechannel- authentication design, will also be described to illustrate that paradigm shift solutions can be developed to meet these great challenges. |
