A Digital Rights Enabled Graphics Processing System

Abstract

With the emergence of 3D graphics/arts assets commerce on the Internet, to protect their intellectual property and to restrict their usage have become a new design challenge. This paper presents a novel protection model for commercial graphics data by integrating digital rights management into the graphics processing unit and creating a digital rights enabled graphics processing system to defend against piracy of entertainment software and copyrighted graphics arts. In accordance with the presented model, graphics content providers distribute encrypted 3D graphics data along with their certified licenses. During rendering, when encrypted graphics data, e.g. geometry or textures, are fetched by a digital rights enabled graphics processing system, it will be decrypted. The graphics processing system also ensures that graphics data such as geometry, textures or shaders are bound only in accordance with the binding constraints designated in the licenses. Special API extensions for media/software developers are also proposed to enable our protection model. We evaluated the proposed hardware system based on cycle-based GPU simulator with configuration in line with realistic implementation and open source video game Quake 3D.