DRM Convergence: Interoperability between DRM Systems

The vision of the multimedia world is that digital content can be freely shared and moved between all kinds of devices. This would be possible for both, unprotected and protected contents. Currently, various Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are used to control access on the protected content. The most famous examples include Apple Fairplay, Windows Media DRM, Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DRM, and Marlin DRM. The protected content format, license management, and trust management differs from one DRM system to another. Therefore, it is necessary to mediate those differences to make DRM systems interoperable. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the approaches for DRM interoperability. Each DRM system has its own Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) domain to manage the trust between different entities like devices and license servers. However, if the entities belong to two similar DRM systems but each having different trust anchor then there is a need of trust establishment that can