Cross Platform Digital Rights Management (CP-DRM) System

A fundamental goal for Cross-Platform Digital Rights Management (CP-DRM) is to allow data owner to control the flow of sensitive digital information even after it’s been released. The Original Classifying Authorities (OCA) should have options on how to protect their digital information and have the ability to track the material when distributed by the receiver. Trident System proposes to leverage the emerging DRM standards to develop a unified architecture for CP-DRM. It will provide OCA with abilities to retain control over the digital information even after the information has been disseminated. One of the key concepts of the proposed solution is the use of Reference Monitor (RM) for enabling decision and enforcement functions. A RM is a part of trusted computing base, always running, tamper-resistant, and cannot be bypassed. The proposed architecture provides two-tier controls: client-side RM (CRM) and server-side RM (SRM). A SRM resides within server environment and mediates all access to digital objects. A CRM resides in the client environment and controls access to and usage of digital objects. This makes it possible to support the flexible policy definition when general polices are controlled by a SRM and finer-control on the digital object will be done by CRM.