Thales has won the silver award for Best Deployment and Case Study in InfoSecurity Products Guide Global Excellence Awards with its protection of a digital cinema distribution system for Qube Cinema. Filmmakers, producers and distributors can now encrypt their digital content and protect their intellectual property while still keeping it easily accessible to authorized users.
In Digital Cinema, movies are encoded, encrypted and distributed via hard drive or satellite feed. They can then be decrypted at the movie theater with information contained in a unique Key Delivery Message (KDM) that unlocks the film for a specific theatre and timeframe. To address the need for efficient security in managing digital cinema keys, Qube used Thales Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to develop KeySmith – a highly efficient digital cinema key management and distribution system that provides ease of use for distributors while at the same time ensuring high assurance protection of the movie content.
Cindy Provin, president, Thales e-Security, Inc., says: “The challenges posed by key management are perceived by many as a major pain point and a barrier to encryption deployment (Ponemon: Global Encryption and Key Management Trends 2015) and this is especially true for service providers. Qube selected Thales HSMs to address the need for efficient security and key management in distributing digital cinema. With more than 40 years’ experience providing key management solutions, Thales HSMs are ideally positioned to help organizations with their crypto security and key management infrastructure. Every day we are seeing pioneering and innovative applications of our technology and Qube Cinema is an excellent example of how Thales is able to solve key management and data protection challenges. This award further recognizes our commitment to delivering innovative data protection and key management solutions that enable customers to protect their most valuable assets. We are honored to receive this award.”
Rajesh Ramachandran, President and CTO, Qube Cinema, says: “Piracy is a problem generally associated with digital content and no less so in the film industry where it is an enormous concern for both studios and distributors who lose billions of dollars each year when films are illegally copied and distributed. The encryption and decryption of content is not a major challenge, however the handling and management of security keys by both the cinema and content owners is. Thales is an expert in encryption key management and the protection of content and intellectual property; its products offer high levels of assurance and operational efficiency and have enabled Qube to develop an online digital cinema key management, distribution and reporting system that not only meets real-world requirements, but offers the highest levels of security while retaining flexibility and ease-of-use for our customers.”