— Multimedia applications communicating over a next generation VPN architecture that allows selective encryption can leverage the security properties of a VPN with its performance drawbacks by securing only a part of the transmitted data instead of the complete set. Selecting appropriate packets for security, however, is still an open research problem and novel methods need to be developed that can guarantee the privacy of a conversation even when a relatively large percentage of data is out in the open. In this paper, we discuss one such approach that we have used for securing MP3 streams. Here, we capitalize on the fundamental data structure defined by the MP3 standard and identify key fields that are necessary for decoding. We conjecture that the privacy of an MP3 stream can be maintained if only these fields are secured instead of the entire stream. Since these fields are 17 to 32 bytes per frame, they constitute only 4 to 7.6% in a typical MP3 stream sampled at 44.1Khz and encod...
Shashank Khanvilkar, Ashfaq A. Khokhar