Eland: An Efficient Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Protocol Applied to Digital Rights Management System

A digital rights management (DRM) system provides the function of packaging raw content into an appropriate distribution form, protection for content temper-proof transmission and circumvention of unauthorized use. The digital rights contents in DRM system improve people’s spiritual quality and create huge market value. However, in the sharing of digital contents, malicious adversaries could bring security and privacy issues even cause infringement of copyright. To solve these problems, valid user identity authentication and secret key distribution to legal users is an efficient method. Nevertheless, the existing authentication schemes for DRM system have problems of security weakness or efficiency to be enhanced. Thereby, we cryptanalyze these protocols’ vulnerabilities and propose a new lightweight anonymous authentication protocol called Eland that can be efficiently applied to DRM system. We compare our protocol with six DRM-related authentication protocols from the aspects of security properties, computation expense and communication cost. Comparisons results indicate that our protocol achieves a well trade-off between security and performance. Specifically, our protocol reduces 37.5% communication cost and satisfies more security requirements than Yu et al.’s scheme.