ABE-VVS: Attribute-Based Encrypted Volumetric Video Streaming

TL;DR

ABE-VVS presents a novel end-to-end DRM solution for volumetric point-cloud streaming by applying Attribute-Based Encryption to selectively encrypt coordinate subsets. Encrypting only $X$, $Y$, and/or $Z$ coordinates achieves strong obfuscation while substantially reducing server and cache load compared with HTTPS, and maintaining comparable cache hit rates. The system supports per-frame delivery, with a CPABE toolkit extension and a lightweight PC-Stream client, and demonstrates that $X$-only encryption offers best client QoE with zero rebuffering under typical conditions. This work highlights practical benefits for scalable, cache-friendly secure volumetric video delivery, and points to future work in segment-based delivery and adaptive bitrate for ABE-enabled streams.

Abstract

This work introduces ABE-VVS, a framework that performs attribute based selective coordinate encryption for point cloud based volumetric video streaming, enabling lightweight yet effective digital rights management (DRM). Rather than encrypting entire point cloud frames, our approach encrypts only selected subsets of coordinates ($X, Y, Z$, or combinations), lowering computational overhead and latency while still producing strong visual distortion that prevents meaningful unauthorized viewing. Our experiments show that encrypting only the $X$ coordinates achieves effective obfuscation while reducing encryption and decryption times by up to 50% and 80%, respectively, compared to full-frame encryption. To our knowledge, this is the first work to provide a novel end-to-end evaluation of a DRM-enabled secure point cloud streaming system. We deployed a point cloud video streaming setup on the CloudLab testbed and evaluated three HTTP-based Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) granularities - ABE-XYZ (encrypting all $X,Y,Z$ coordinates), ABE-XY, and ABE-X against conventional HTTPS/TLS secure streaming as well as an HTTP-only baseline without any security. Our streaming evaluation demonstrates that ABE-based schemes reduce server-side CPU load by up to 80% and cache CPU load by up to 63%, comparable to HTTP-only, while maintaining similar cache hit rates. Moreover, ABE-XYZ and ABE-XY exhibit lower client-side rebuffering than HTTPS, and ABE-X achieves zero rebuffering comparable to HTTP-only. Although ABE-VVS increases client-side CPU usage, the overhead is not large enough to affect streaming quality and is offset by its broader benefits, including simplified key revocation, elimination of per-client encryption, and reduced server and cache load.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: System Architecture
• Figure 2: Selective Coordinate Encryption Process
• Figure 3: Visuals of four point clouds: 108k, 334k, 433k, 515k.
• Figure 4: Evaluation of encryption times across various granularities and point cloud sizes.
• Figure 5: Evaluation of decryption times across various granularities and point cloud sizes.