Security methods for MP3 music delivery

The impetus for the work presented in this paper arose from the need to enable Internet-based secure audio delivery and protection of digitized music against illegal distribution. The approach described, provides protection for the widely accepted MPEG-1 Layer-3 audio encoding format, although it can easily be applied to any other perceptual audio coding (PAC) standard. During the process of MP3 encoding, selective, content-based security features are added to the stream in order to de-couple and protect individual layers of audio quality while introducing minimal processing overhead and maintaining the audio format. In addition to quality-layered protection, we propose simultaneous use of our audio watermarking technology for a complete solution in network-based secure audio delivery and copyright protection.