Protect your assets from unscrupulous republishing. Media Vault, a key feature of LimelightDELIVER and LimelightSTREAM, lets you secure access to your content, flexibly and efficiently, while maximizing performance and minimizing latency. Media Vault can secure your HTTP content — as well as Flash, Windows Media, and mp3 streaming media — by restricting who can see it, when they can see it, and which web sites can display it.

Shared secret

Media Vault uses a shared secret encoded in the URL itself to avoid the three-way handshakes common to other forms of authentication. These less efficient methods can lead to severe latency in connection time while your user waits on a central verification server. Media Vault uses an MD5 hash to encrypt the secret phrase shared between the Limelight Networks CDN and you — as well as any other limiting factors you choose, such as IP block or URL expiration time — all in the URL itself.

The shared secret method helps you scale easily: Since all verification is embedded in the URL, you don’t need to add capacity to a verification server as your business grows — like you do with other solutions. New versions of Media Vault let you use two shared secrets at a time: if your secret gets compromised, there is a second one that can be used as a backup. The first one expires after all servers know the second secret, and no content request ever fails.

IP protection

The requesting IP address is one parameter you can embed in a Media Vault-protected URL. By restricting access to an individual IP address or to a range of IP addresses, you can be sure your media is available only to those clients you specify. This feature works with Windows Media and Flash streaming.

Time-to-live

By encoding the start and end time in a URL, you can set a time-to-live for the content. End users can’t access the media before or after times that you choose. Enter a start time to set content to automatically go live in the future — without worrying that your audience may see a video episode before its scheduled time, or information about an unannounced product. Setting an end time helps you prevent unauthorized sites from hot-linking to your assets indefinitely. And since the URL is encrypted, nobody can guess what these times are. This Media Vault feature works with Flash, Windows Media, and mp3 streaming, as well as HTTP delivery.

Page and referrer URL

You can also encrypt your page and referrer URLs with similar MD5-hash protection to keep other sites from showing your media without your authorization. For instance, the referrer might be http://www.yoursite.com/movie.swf, and a page might look like http://www.yoursite.com/page.hml. If a request for your media comes from a different Flash player or from a different page, Media Vault will not serve your content to the offending client. These restrictions work with Media Vault for Flash streaming.

Contact your Limelight Networks representative to discuss the best way to protect your content with Media Vault.

Media Vault service details

• Media Vault HTTP delivery: Time-to-live security
• Media Vault Flash streaming: IP Protection, time-to-live, and page and referrer URL security
• Media Vault Windows Media streaming: Multiple shared secrets, IP Protection, and time-to-live security
• Media Vault mp3 streaming: Time-to-live security