Collaborative DRM Filter Distribution for Access Control
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing digital rights management (DRM) systems struggle to enforce permissions and restrictions in collaborative applications, where multiple users share digital content, as they lack the ability to apply DRM policies effectively across shared content and users with varying access rights.
Innovation Solution
A system and method where a collaboration host determines and distributes DRM policies to participants in a collaborative session, using a filter that includes information about the rights management policy, allowing collaborative viewers to enforce permissions based on user roles and restrictions, thereby ensuring that only authorized actions can be performed on shared protected content.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If DRM policies are applied to protected content in collaborative sessions, then access control and security are improved, but system complexity increases due to the need to manage multiple users, roles, and permissions
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments DRM policy management into distinct components: a collaboration host that receives protected content, determines applicable DRM policies, and distributes them to participants. Each participant then enforces policies locally based on their role. This segmentation reduces overall system complexity by distributing the enforcement burden rather than requiring a centralized complex management system.
Solution Approach 2:
The collaboration host acts as an intermediary between the protected content source and the participants. It receives the protected content, determines which DRM policies apply, and distributes the content along with policy information to appropriate participants. This intermediary role simplifies the system by centralizing policy determination while allowing decentralized enforcement.
2Reliability
If DRM policies are enforced for each participant with different roles, then security and compliance are improved, but the ease of operation deteriorates due to multiple authentication and permission checks
Solution Approach 1:
The collaboration host performs preliminary action by determining which DRM policies apply to the protected content and distributing this information to participants before they need to access the content. This advance preparation eliminates the need for repeated authentication and permission checks during content access, improving ease of operation while maintaining security.
Solution Approach 2:
Each participant is equipped with the necessary DRM policy information and authentication credentials to independently determine their own access rights and enforce policies locally. This self-service approach eliminates the need for continuous centralized authorization checks, improving operational ease while maintaining strong security through decentralized enforcement.
Data Source
AI summary
A system for enforcing rights management policies in a collaborative environment is provided. The system may reside at a collaboration host and may include a session manager to manage a collaborative session associated with a plurality of participants, a shared view detector to detect a request to distribute shared content to participants of the collaborative session, a policy module to obtain a rights management policy associated with at least a portion of the shared content, a filter generator to generate a filter based on the obtained rights management policy, and a shared view distributor to distribute the shared content to the participants of the collaborative session together with the filter.