Protecting digital assets: How DPI-driven digital rights management ensures secure monetization

Digital assets are pieces of work that exist in digital formats. Examples include movies, e-books, newspapers, audio clips, stock images, music videos, market reports, SaaS applications, patents, posters, health information and even text fonts! The surge in digital content creation and consumption has led to significant challenges in digital asset protection, as threat actors exploit vulnerabilities for illegal access and use. Issues such as theft, tampering, and content piracy on P2P exchanges pose serious risks to content owners. Digital assets are also susceptible to abuse by users who exploit fair usage policies and licensed access to legitimate platforms for illicit activities.

What is digital rights management (DRM)?

To mitigate these risks, content owners are adopting digital rights management (DRM) systems. DRM tools use encryption and licensing to enforce different access rules for digital assets. Content servers use license keys to authenticate users and device identities. With the use of embed codes, content owners can manage access dynamically based on subscription and user status, allowing real-time changes in rights and privileges.

DRM systems have become commonplace with the rise in OTT applications and multi-screen viewing trends. Major platforms like Apple, Netflix and Amazon Music leverage DRM technologies to protect their content. Apple, for example, uses FairPlay which allows it to protect its music and video content on iTunes or Apple TV. Netflix pre-encodes its content using a DRM system and combines this with high-bandwidth digital content protection to ensure secure streaming across authorized devices. Similarly, Amazon Music’s DRM technology uses licensing to ensure its music is downloaded or played only by licensed users. By 2032, the global DRM market size is projected to reach USD 12.4 billion, with a CAGR of 10 % over the next ten years, according to IMARC Group .

The role of deep packet inspection in DRM

Deep packet inspection (DPI) is revolutionizing the field of DRM. DPI software like ipoque’s R&S^®PACE 2 and R&S^®vPACE not only identify applications and traffic protocols but also analyze the underlying services. For example, DPI engines like R&S^®PACE 2 and R&S^®vPACE can identify Netflix traffic and distinguish between video streaming and channel browsing sessions. DPI also extracts metadata that is embedded at the packet level, allowing it to detect DRM-protected packets and flows. This also provides further insights about the IP flows after the initial classification of relevant applications, protocols or services.

Enhanced access control with DPI

DPI’s application- and service-awareness, combined with its ability to track DRM-protected traffic, significantly bolster DRM’s access control functionalities, ensuring:

• User and device authorization
• Enforcement of access policies (e.g., time-limited access, single-user licenses)
• Detection of rogue devices
• Compliance with regional content restrictions

Monitoring user behavior

In addition to access control functionalities, DPI analysis can be used to flag user actions during live sessions. For example, across administrator sign-ins, DPI can detect large file transfers or multiple sessions from the same location. These real-time feeds from DPI can be used by DRM systems to track anomalous behavior indicative of data breaches or infiltration. For standard user sessions, DPI data helps DRM systems to monitor irregularities in streaming, viewing and downloading activities that are against the rights or privileges and norms associated with a user account.

Managing marketplaces and transactions

Real-time network traffic analysis from DPI can enrich DRM systems deployed across user-generated content platforms and marketplaces to manage subscriptions, users and transactions. DPI enables DRM systems to identify cumulative sessions by application (via signatures), content (via DRM embed codes) and users (via IP addresses). This information helps a DRM tool to reconcile its revenues and creator compensations against actual access and usage data. This capability is crucial for global marketplaces to control the availability of prohibited content in specific jurisdictions. Additionally, analytics from DPI software can be used to support platform optimization, for example content caching. Here, DPI can be used to identify cached content that is stale (based on timestamps), and also unauthorized access to cache content.

Tracking content usage

One of DRM’s primary benefit is that it helps content owners track their content, its usage and its transmission. DPI packet and flow analysis, based on packet metadata, application signatures and digital watermarks, enable DRM tools to retrieve sessions for any single content or application, paving the way for a comprehensive usage trail and history. This is particularly useful for ensuring compliance with data protection regulations, such as HIPAA or GLBA, where DRM systems are tasked with monitoring highly-sensitive content and ensuring it is restricted appropriately.

Uncovering hidden assets with encrypted traffic intelligence

ipoque’s DPI software R&S^®PACE 2 and R&S^®vPACE feature encrypted traffic intelligence (ETI), allowing DRM tools to identify applications and services, despite the use of encryption, obfuscation or anonymization. This feature is particularly important in DRM, whose key mechanism involves encryption, which inadvertently, makes tracking of DRM-protected content difficult for regular probes and monitoring systems. With encrypted traffic intelligence, DRM tools are able to track their DRM-protected digital assets in any network or geography. They can also identify illegal transmission of such content on VPNs and other obscure channels.

Interestingly, DPI’s ability to identify blockchain protocols enables DPI to report blockchain-based traffic. For DRM tools using blockchain to authenticate users, transfer asset ownership and enforce smart contracts, real-time traffic analysis allows DRM tools to monitor against anomalies in these transactions, including traffic surges that do not align with actual transactions executed by DRM.

DPI: A strategic companion for DRM

DPI’s deep traffic intelligence also provides excellent inputs for optimizing DRM rules and processes in the long run. Using application and protocol awareness provided by DPI, DRM tools can tighten monitoring for sensitive applications and content types that exhibit higher piracy rates. They can also adjust their rules to address cybersecurity vulnerabilities that are prevalent across certain content platforms and content types.

While the use of DPI in DRM is still in its nascent stage, the growth in digital content and the proliferation of OTT, SaaS and web apps that host popular and premium content will necessitate fine-grained, real-time visibility into their traffic flows. For this purpose, DPI meets the criteria of a reliable, robust and high-performant tool for visibility and analytics that helps DRM support millions of content owners and creators in sharing and monetizing their content successfully. Therefore, the integration of DPI in DRM systems will become increasingly vital.

Explore our DPI solutions today and see how they can empower your DRM system to deliver unparalleled visibility, analytics, and content protection.