Sharing digital photos on the Internet these days means in real terms giving up your privacy. The success of websites like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut goes to show the immense popularity of user-generated content. Once content has been shared, it cannot be taken back. People could download the content, edit them and misuse them… and that too without your knowledge. The original content owner loses control over their digital content once it has been shared.
Overcoming this challenge is an interesting new technology from A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research called SUSie, that enables you to control who can view/edit your pictures after someone has downloaded them off, say, your website or social networking page.
This technology was displayed at CommunicAsia 2009, recently held at the Singapore Expo, potentially targeting Social Networking Sites, companies that offer Project Management Solutions and even Managed Security Service Providers.
SUSie (Share & UnShare, it’s easy)
- A privacy enhancing cryptography technology
- Allows a private, secure and efficient way to share digital media.
- Takes back the ownership of the shared files.
- Effectively destroys all the shared copies of the files.
This means that if you wish to share your vacation pictures on a website, you can do so without any worries. With the help of this new technology, you can always prevent someone who has downloaded your photos from editing or copying later. You could make the most out of a secure and safe cyberworld, where content ownership and usage control is in your hands and unsharing can be performed at any point, if necessarily.
Sharing & Unsharing
- Sharing refers to enabling content to be read and stored by the recipients.
- Unsharing refers to complete annulment of media content unknowingly read or exposed to the recipients.
Technology Features
- Efficient, tamper-resistant key and digital certificates management techniques for P2P content exchange.
- Superior digital rights management (DRM) for user-generated content.
- Media encryption while transmitting, storage and reading.
- Printing and storage can be disenabled.
- No passwords and user id required for better enhanced security.
- Supports photos (JPEG), videos (MPEG 4), and PDF documents and can be expanded to support more.
Benefits
- More people will be willing to upload and store their photos and videos over the internet for sharing as there is less worry on phishing.
- People will have full control of media content, which means they can share or unshared any time, any place.
- Since the content is always encrypted and tamper-resistant (although not 100% full proof), it will make life difficult for thieves.
- No or minimal passwords and user ID is required.
- People can enjoy a more secure and safer cyberworld where content ownership and usage control can be retained for ALL.
Available for Licensing
- Susie Platform, Version 1, comprising of the writer and reader on the desktop.
- Susie Mobile, comprising of the writer and reader on the Nokia phones and synchronization with the desktop (upcoming)
SUSie is currently positioned at niche markets that demand efficient sharing and unsharing of (online and mobile) media content.
(Source: exploit-tech | SUSie)