Privacy-Preserving DRM for Cloud Computing

Abstract

We come up with a digital rights management (DRM) concept for cloud computing and show how license management for software within the cloud can be achieved in a privacy-friendly manner. In our scenario, users who buy software from software providers stay anonymous. At the same time, our approach guarantees that software licenses are bound to users and their validity is checked before execution. We employ a software re-encryption scheme so that computing centers which execute users' software are not able to build user profiles - not even under pseudonym - of their users. We combine secret sharing and homomorphic encryption. We make sure that malicious users are unable to relay software to others. DRM constitutes an incentive for software providers to take partin a future cloud computing scenario. We make this scenario more attractive for users by preserving their privacy.