Lightweight DRM for Volumetric Point Clouds through Attribute-Based Selective Coordinate Encryption

This work aims to enable efficient digital rights management (DRM) for volumetric video by introducing attribute-based selective coordinate encryption for point clouds. By encrypting only a subset of coordinates, our approach reduces computational overhead and latency while maintaining necessary security. Selective encryption ensures that point cloud frames—and, by extension, entire volumetric videos—are sufficiently obfuscated so that, while the content remains viewable, it appears highly distorted and visually unpleasant, preventing meaningful unauthorized viewing. We propose a flexible framework that allows varying the amount and type of co-ordinate encryption (e.g., X, Y, Z, or combinations), and we assess visual degradation using established point cloud quality metrics. Our results show that encrypting only X coordinates cuts encryption and decryption times by 37% and 46%, respectively, compared to full-frame encryption, while X and Y encryption achieves 20% and 36% reductions, both still significantly degrading visual quality. Leveraging Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) further enables content to be securely cached and efficiently distributed in its protected form, eliminating the need for re-encryption, thereby reducing computational load and latency. While our current evaluation is limited to individual point cloud frames, future work will extend to entire volumetric video streams, including analysis of caching gains during streaming with ABE.