Tomas Sander (InterTrust STAR Lab) recently posted a 'Call for Papers' in connection with an ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Digital Rights Management, to be held November 5, 2001 in Philadelphia, PA. The workshop is part of the Eighth ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS-8). The workshop "will consider technical problems faced by rights holders (who seek to protect their intellectual property rights) and end consumers (who seek to protect their privacy and to preserve access they now enjoy in traditional media under existing copyright law). The organizers seek submissions from academia and industry presenting novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of DRM, as well as experimental studies of fielded systems; they encourage submissions from other communities such as law and business that present these communities' perspectives on technological issues... Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are supposed to serve mass markets, in which the participants have conflicting goals and cannot be fully trusted. This adversarial situation introduces interesting new twists on classical problems studied in cryptology and security research, such as key management and access control." Interest in Digital Rights Management is rapidly gaining ground, as evidenced by the growing number of industry and consortial initiatives proposing new architectures and models. XML-based standardization efforts are also underway within ISO, IETF, W3C, OASIS, and related arenas.

Details: Workshop on Security and Privacy in Digital Rights Management 2001. November 5, 2001. The Doubletree Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Paper submissions due August 3, 2001. Acceptance notifications on September 7, 2001. CCS Conference November 6-8, 2001.

DRM tutorial "Techniques for Digital Rights Management." By Stuart Haber, Ph.D., Intertrust STAR Lab. "This tutorial will explore the space of engineering tradeoffs in the design of DRM systems, mixing two points of view. First, viewing the task top-down, we will consider the overall architecture of a DRM system, emphasizing clear statements of the aims of the particular system. Second, bottom-up, we will consider many of the technical tools that can be used in building a DRM system, including key management, authentication, broadcast encryption, traitor-tracing, auditing measures, payment mechanisms, watermarking, and tamper resistance."