The technique called progressive encryption is used in many areas of content security. However, the plain algorithm itself is only applicable in real transmission scenarios where no packet loss occurs, otherwise additional error correction techniques need to be used in order to achieve maximum decodeability of network packets. The cipher-stepping method (CSM) described in this article adds error correction to progressive encryption in the case where stream ciphers are used to encrypt stream data. It is also explained how the CSM method along with progressive encryption can be used in the encryption of scalable video streams.