Consumers increasingly act as producers and distributors, mobility is becoming more and more important, and the use of social networks and cloud services is on a rise. Such trends lead to an abundance of new opportunities for handling and using media content, but at the same time they create many challenges e.g. with respect to data authenticity, privacy and copyright.

The goal of the Media Distribution and Security group is to develop and apply technologies to efficiently aggregate, process and distribute media contents, while avoiding security, copyright and privacy problems at the same time. The ultimate aim is to develop and implement balanced approached which promote trust between all system actors and help to exploit economic potentials that benefit all stakeholders.

Media Distribution

This research area deals with media convergence and the development of technologies for incentive-oriented media distribution, lightweight content protection and P2P security. The goal is to exploit a broad range of technologies for the purpose of cost-efficient, secure distribution of media that respects the interest of consumers, prosumers and producers at the same time.

Media Security and Privacy Protection

This research area combines activities dealing with problems around media security and privacy in distributed media applications: confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, reliability, anonymity/pseudonymity, and unobservability.

Security and privacy aspects have major importance in many applications, and they need to be addressed and implemented as integral aspects from an early stage of the development process. For that purpose, it is crucial to consider the specific requirements and constraints of the respective system.

Copyright-aware Media Handling

When aggregating, storing, processing and distributing media contents in B2B scenarios (e. g. digital archives, search engines, broadcasting, etc.), it is often difficult to determine which individual actions are authorized by the underlying license and rights information and which are not, given the specific conditions. Especially for handling of huge amounts of data, it is desirable to automate this process as much as possible. This research area deals with the modeling of rights and license information, and develops the necessary approaches and components. e. g. for content identification, authentication and the analysis, deduction and consideration of content handling rules based on license and rights information.