FIRST USENIX WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC COMMERCE, JULY 1995

DigiBox: A Self-Protecting Container for Information Commerce

Olin Sibert, David Bernstein, and David Van Wie
Electronic Publishing Resources, Inc.
Sunnyvale, California

Abstract

Information Commerce is a business activity carried out among several parties in which information carries value and is treated as a product. The information may be content, it may be returned usage and marketing data, and it may be representative of financial transactions.

In each of these cases the information is valuable and must be kept secure and private. Traditional approaches secure the transmission of that information from one point to another; there are no persistent protections. Protection of all of these components of information commerce for all parties in a transaction value chain is necessary for a robust electronic infrastructure.

A prerequisite to such an environment is a cryptographically protected container for packaging information and controls that enforce information rights. This paper describes such a container, called the DigiBoxª. EPR has submitted initial specifications for the DigiBox container to the ANSI IISP Electronic Publishing Task Force (EPUB) within the User/Content Provider Standards Working Group (WG4).

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