Fingerprint-based access control using smart cards in IPTV

In internet protocol television (IPTV) environments, authentication should be implemented to provide the IPTV contents to those legitimate subscribers. After successful authentication, a legitimate subscriber is unconditionally granted access to the contents. However, each content might have its own policy that restricts access according to subscriber’s attribute such as age. Authentication only is not sufficient to realize access control embracing diverse policies depending on contents. In this paper, we propose a novel fingerprint-based scheme that enables fine-grained access control according to the policies of contents providers and subscriber’s attribute. The proposed scheme is robust against man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, and impersonation attacks which are considered as common threats in IPTV environments. The scheme also prevents cloning and McCormac Hack problems, that are critical attacks specific to authentication using smart cards.