
 
towards the service they supply, and are described in 
more detail in the next section. These internal 
components are self-descriptive, in the sense that 
they expose an open WSDL description of the 
services they provide. Any authenticated component 
on the DoRM platform can connect to any of the 
services it provides – DRM services – to implement 
its business logic. These internal components 
communicate with each other using secured SOAP 
messages (Serrão et al, 2003). The discovery and 
identification of services is provided by a central 
configuration component (CFS), an UDDI server 
that provides information about the services 
subscribed at platform and information on how to 
use them. The present DRM state of the art, offers a 
fragmented landscape of proprietary offerings where 
the knowledge of how to bridge the different islands 
resides nowhere. Current DRM technology can be 
best described as a set of islands that don’t have any 
bridges between them. Thus, most of DRM 
platforms use vertical approaches to the rights 
management problem, assuming that along the entire 
digital content value chain, from the digital rights 
owner to the final end-user, the same DRM 
technology will be used. This is an approach that 
affects both digital rights owners and end-users – in 
the case of digital rights owners they see their task 
complicated by the fact that they have to handle with 
a much higher complexity in their digital contents 
provision (multiple formats, multiple devices, 
multiple rights expression and management); in the 
end-users case, users will have to deal with a 
multiplicity of different players and devices that are 
dedicated to render a specific type of DRM-
protected content.  
DoRM differs from other vertical DRM technologies 
assuming a horizontal approach. Unlike other DRM 
solutions, DoRM is completely independent from 
type of content, the delivery mechanism, the adopted 
business model and even the methods used to protect 
the content itself. Another crucial difference 
between DoRM and other DRM initiatives resides in 
the fact that all the DRM services are split and 
distributed over an open network. DoRM was 
developed having in mind the concept of DRM 
interoperability, and new functionalities are being 
added to allow the interoperability with other 
proprietary DRM systems. The DoRM conceptual 
architecture is composed of three different types of 
components: the user (not necessarily the end-users) 
roles; a set of external entities to the DRM process 
itself; and the internal DRM entities which provide 
the DRM functionality. 
Around the DoRM platform there are a set of 
external actors systems. The external actors are: the 
End-User, the Device Provider, the Content 
Provider, the Security Tools Providers and the IPR 
societies. There are also some external systems 
which may interact with the DoRM platform that 
are: the Devices, the Content Delivery Systems, the 
Content Selection system, the Financial System and 
the Certification System. The Certification System is 
a very important component on the system and it’s 
responsible for receiving requests for and issuing 
credentials to entities. These credentials will be used 
by entities to authenticate themselves to each other, 
allowing the establishment of secure and 
authenticated communication channels between 
them (this is part of the establishment of one of the 
two DoRM security layers) (Serrão et al, 2003). All 
the components in the DoRM architecture 
communicate using the channel security provided by 
the SSL/TLS protocol (Serrão et al, 2003). This 
Certification Authority may be internal to DoRM, 
and therefore entirely managed by some entity, or it 
may be an external commercial entity, such as 
Verisign or Thawte (Serrão et al, 2004). 
The internal components of the DoRM platform 
include: Content Management System, License 
Manager System, Payment System, Content 
Protection System and Authentication and 
Accounting System. 
The Content Management System
 is a system 
component whose role is to assign unique identifiers 
to content and to register metadata information for 
that specific content. The service assigns unique 
identifiers to content using the MPEG-21 (ISO/IEC 
21000-3) directives about Digital Item Identification 
(DII), using a reduced version of the MPEG-21 DII 
Digital Object Identifiers (Dalziel, 2002). This 
server component is also responsible for notifying 
the appropriate content servers that a given content 
has been requested and that needs to be feed to the 
final user. This Content Management System 
handles also the content preparation. It receives raw 
content from a specified source or sources and 
encodes it on a specified format, adds metadata and 
protects it. It is not implemented using the WS 
approach, although it uses some components that 
provide such approach. This system component 
exposes three major functionalities: Content 
Preparation Server (CPS), the Media Delivery 
Server (MDS) and the Registration Server (RGS). 
The License Manager System
 is a system component 
responsible for house-keeping the rules associating a 
user, the content and his/her corresponding access 
rights. This component will accept connections from 
SECRYPT 2006 - INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SECURITY AND CRYPTOGRAPHY
232