Enhancing selective encryption for H.264/AVC using advanced encryption standard

Abstract

Video encryption algorithms have becomes an important field of research nowadays. As an increasing rate of applying video is getting high, the security of video data becomes more important. A digital media can be transmitted easily in real time anywhere at any time due to the advanced development of communications, Internet and multimedia technology. Information availability has increased dramatically with the advent of mobile devices. However, with this availability comes a problem of maintaining the security of information that is displayed in public. Many approaches have been used or proposed to provide security for information disseminated over the networks. These include encryption, authentication, and digital signatures. For video, the method has been adopted to protect unwanted interception and viewing of any video while in transmission over the networks. In this thesis, a development of an enhanced selective video encryption scheme for H.264/AVC based on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) was reported. A proposed scheme been used instead of encrypting the entire video stream bit by bit, only the I-Frames bitstreams were encrypted. This scheme took into consideration the good features of former selective encryption algorithms with regard to computational complexity, and data compression performance. The proposed system was tested in the simulated environment using different video sequences. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides adequate security to video streams. It has no effect on compression ratio and does not reduce the original video compression efficiency. Moreover, the proposed scheme provides a good trade-off between encryption robustness, flexibility, and real-time processing. It is an appropriate ii technique for secure H.264 bitstreams that require transmission or storage in un-trusted intermediate devices.