Encryption Techniques for H.264 Video

Data encryption is one of the important information security technologies used for safeguarding multimedia content. This book chapter will focus on the encryption techniques for H.264, which is the latest video coding standard and has become one of the most promising techniques for future video communications. A major concern in the design of H.264 encryption algorithms is how to achieve a sufficiently high level of security, while maintaining the efficiency of the underlying compression algorithm. In this chapter, a review on various H.264 video encryption methods will first be performed. Feasibility study on various techniques meeting application specific criteria will be carried out and some problems of the existing techniques will be pointed out. As chaos has intrinsic properties such as sensitivity to initial conditions, deterministic oscillations and noise-like behavior, it has acquired much attention for video content protection. A novel joint compression and encryption scheme based on the context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) module of H.264 video codec is then presented using a chaotic stream cipher. It is shown that the proposed H.264 encryption scheme based on a discrete piecewise linear chaotic map is secure in perception, efficient and format compliant and suitable for practical video protection. Finally, some possible directions on H.264 encryption will also be discussed in this chapter.