On the design of systems for digital rights management

Stuart Haber
InterTrust STAR Lab


The term "digital rights management" (DRM) has come to be used to
describe systems that attempt to attach different sorts of rules to the
use of information in digital form.  These rules may limit in various
ways the use of specific digital objects, and may entail certain
obligations on the part of the users.

This talk will explore the space of engineering tradeoffs in the design
of DRM systems, mixing two points of view.  First, viewing the task
top-down, we will consider the overall architecture of a DRM system,
emphasizing clear statements of the aims of the particular system.
Second, bottom-up, we will briefly consider several of the technical
tools that can be used in building a DRM system, including key
management, authentication, broadcast encryption, traitor-tracing,
auditing measures, payment mechanisms, watermarking, and tamper
resistance.

The discussion will include the study of several existing systems, with
a view to extracting useful lessons from the history of what has and
what hasn't worked in different circumstances.  The relevant
circumstances include the economic context of the systems studied as
well as the details of their engineering design and implementation.

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Bio
---
Stuart Haber is a Member of Research Staff at STAR Lab, the research
lab of InterTrust Technologies, the providers of a general-purpose
digital rights management (DRM) platform.  Along with Scott Stornetta,
he is a co-founder of Surety, which was spun off by Bellcore in 1993 in
order to commercialize the digital time-stamping technology that the
two of them developed as researchers at Bellcore (now Telcordia
Technologies).  Before the founding of Surety, Stuart was a researcher
at Bellcore.

Stuart received his B.A. from Harvard University and his M.S. from
Stanford University, both in mathematics, and his Ph.D. in computer
science from Columbia University.  He has lectured and published
scientific articles in both the practical and theoretical aspects of
cryptology, in the theory of computing, and in electrical engineering