In digital contents distribution environments, a user authentication is an important security primitive to allow only authenticated user to use right services by checking the validity of membership. For example, in Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) ...
In digital contents distribution environments, a user authentication is an important security primitive to allow only authenticated user to use right services by checking the validity of membership. For example, in Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) environments, it is required to provide an access control according to the policy of content provider. Remote user authentication and key agreement scheme is used to validate the contents accessibility of a user. We propose a novel user authentication scheme using smart cards providing a secure access to multimedia contents service. Each user is authenticated using a subset of attributes which are issued in the registration phase without revealing individual's identity. Our scheme provides the anonymous authentication and the various permissions according to the combination of attributes which are assigned to each user. In spite of more functionality, the result of performance analysis shows that the computation and communication cost is very low. Using this scheme, the security of contents distribution environments in the client-server model can be significantly improved.