A Content-Independent Scalable Encryption Model

Journal article, 2004

Various user surveys have shown that security will be a key business enabler for applications of future communication systems. In these, security requirements will vary heavily---from very low to extremely rigid. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how security could be treated in a more flexible and dynamic way. A content-independent model for scalable encryption, which is based on a partial encryption paradigm, is proposed and described. The main advantage with this model is that the users are able to make trade-offs between security and performance. In the paper, we describe the design and implementation as well as an initial performance analysis of the proposed model.