Authentication of scalable multimedia streams

Multimedia services such as Internet streaming and video conferencing are increasingly getting very popular among all sectors of society and all ages. Many users rely on these services for activities related to their work, education, and entertainment. Users typically receive multimedia content over open network channels, where malicious attackers could potentially intercept and manipulate such content for political, financial or other reasons. Therefore, ensuring the authenticity of received multimedia streams is clearly an important problem. This chapter first proposes a set of requirements that an authentication scheme designed for multimedia streams should meet. It then surveys the most important schemes in the literature for authenticating non-scalable as well as scalable multimedia streams. Unlike non-scalable streams, scalable streams provide flexible adaptation to accommodate the dynamic network conditions and the diversity of receiving devices. Moreover, the chapter presents a qualitative comparison among the presented schemes using the proposed set of requirements, and it outlines potential directions for future research on authentication of multimedia streams.