How SyncDNA Content Security protects pre-release content

In the modern media landscape, content security is one of the highest priorities for any production company. Not only can a leak cost valuable box office sales or streams, it can also undermine the credibility of everybody involved in the project. Thus, it's incredibly important to have the whole process locked down, from start to finish.

Fortunately, this is a key area where SyncDNA's recording, editing, and reviewing software can help any production company, big or small, to improve their security posture. We have several key features to protect media transfers, reduce exposure to content loss, create an audit trail, and manage access and permissions for all collaborators.

When things go wrong

A content security breach can have serious fallout, not just for individuals involved, but for entire studios and companies as well.

For example, in 2014 a major media company was breached by a hostile nation-state threat actor, leading to at as much as $100 million in estimated losses.

This is a very serious ever-present threat that looms over the entire industry. While things have improved in the decade since, new attack vectors and vulnerabilities are constantly emerging. It's now more important than ever to be hardened against these threats.

Media encryption

To protect content, all media streamed through SyncDNA is secured with session-based AES-256 encryption. This is a core feature of our platform, and can't be disabled.

To be clear, this isn't just wrapping a media stream in TLS like everybody else does. We go above and beyond by encrypting data with a session-specific key that is under complete control of the session leader, and only revealed to collaborators that meet the requirements and have been granted permission to receive media streams. The result is a highly secure transfer mechanism that is tightly controlled by the owner of the content, thus reducing risk and exposure.

This also lets the session leader immediately delete data stored on a participant's system when the session ends or the individual is removed.

Watermarks on video streams

Another key part of content security is attribution. If an individual with malicious intent records their screen during a review session, they could potentially leak a lower-quality version of a near-finished product.

To prevent this, we place a watermark with the date & the participant's email address on screen. This is baked-in during video transmission, and cannot be bypassed by the user.

This can not only become an important part of attribution, but also discourage a would-be leaker.

Role-based access control

A project can be a large undertaking, with dozens or more collaborators. Thus, it's crucial that each person is only given the access they need, commonly known as the Principle of Least Privilege.

There are three levels of user access in the system:

Administrator - Full control: manage users, billing access, change subscription
Studio - Create, start, and run sessions as the producer
Guest - Participate in sessions as a reviewer or performer

Guests can also be invited either to the organization, or to a single session depending on their role in the project.

A single account can be a member of multiple organizations, and have different levels of access in each one, so it's only necessary to have a single account for all the projects one might work on.

More information about organization management is also available in our documentation.

Get started today!

We don't charge extra for security and privacy features, so all of these features are available in every usage tier. This is a core part of our organization, and we want to make it easy for yours too.

Want to get started? Get up and running with a free trial today!