A Design of Key Distribution Mechanism in Decentralized Digital Rights Management Based on Blockchain and Zero-Knowledge Proof

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a basic requirement in the Internet era. In order to solve the disadvantages caused by centralization in traditional DRM, many decentralized DRM (DDRM) structure are proposed, and they have achieved decentralization in copyright registration, copyright trading, etc. However, the distribution of content keys is their bottleneck. Different from public copyright and transaction information, content key which is used for digital content decryption cannot be directly disclosed to decentralized nodes. The existing DDRM relies on specific nodes or an ideal trust environment to issue encrypted content keys, which makes the system unable to be completely decentralized. In this paper, we proposed a decentralized key distribution system, and it can be compatible with the existing DDRM structure. We use zero-knowledge proof technology to prove to others the correctness of the encrypted content key without revealing it. We use blockchain technology to achieve decentralized key distribution, without relying on any trusted center. Our system allows consumers and agents to apply for and distribute content keys without trusting each other. Malicious users cannot commit fraud against others, and damaged nodes will not affect the stability and reliability of the system.