Enforcing DRM policies across applications

Abstract

In this paper we present Trishul-UCON (T-UCON), a DRM system based on the UCON_ABC model. T-UCON is designed to be capable of enforcing not only application-specific policies, as any existing software-based DRM solution does, but also DRM policies across applications. This is achieved by binding the DRM policy only to the content it protects with no relations to the application(s) which will use this content. Furthermore, to guarantee that the policy is continuously enforced, we designed T-UCON as a JVM-based middleware that mediates the usage requests of any Java application to the protected content. Each request is granted or denied according to the content policy. We illustrate the unique features of T-UCON by using typical examples of DRM policies such as the pay-per-use and the use only N times scenarios. Preliminary results on the overhead of our solution are also provided.