Any research or exploration done with integrating encryption or password-protection into FLAC?

?? Why on earth would anyone want that? Your basicly asking for some sort of DRM for FLAC...erm no. Goto a DRM compatable format...like MP3 or apple lossless.

You could encode it as a private stream in MPEG-4 File Format and use OMA to encrypt. However, you're unlikely get any help around here implementing a DRM scheme

Ah, er, well.. hrmmm.

I was thinking more along the lines of personal protection, like how zip files can be password protected or NTFS folders can be encrypted.

FLAC has a design which can lend itself to live streaming, and in that case a scrambler which doesn't add information + reasonably powerful computer, you could have real-time encrypted streaming flac.. the benefit of compression over the transmission while being secure, and the benefit of lossless decode for only the authorized listener.

Your best bet is to stream the FLAC over an L2TP, IPsec or PPTP tunnel. I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to add encryption to FLAC, but that solves only one of the problems of security - the other details, such as key distribution, are much harder.

Use a secure transmission system then. Format level encryption only makes sense for DRM. Otherwise there are better ways to do the same thing.

I presume that you mean MP4 . . . ?

See the flac site "Anti-goals" on http://flac.sourceforge.net/goals.html

mhhh password protect individual files? way to much effort...

if you wann do encryption of a HD partition or a file which contains a partition use this tool (best and free and secure, my 300GB media partition is encrypted)
http://www.truecrypt.org/

Copy protection has nothing to do with file-level passwords or encryption. And tunneling/transmission level encryption requires alot of setup, especially when firewalls and NAT are involved.

I've used password-protected zip files a number of times. The password adds negligible size to the compressed file, and distributing/communicating the password to the appropriate parties is painlessly easy.

If the security was embedded into the flac encoder/decoder, then lossless wav output would always be available for copying and converting to other formats.

Password protection is a simple copy-protection - in case someone copied your precious file while you've been transmitting it over the network, he will be unable to open it without a password. If you want to secure your communications, then transport layer security is the right answer (as cabbagerat already said).


Quite the contrary: if the security was embedded into the flac encoder/decoder, then lossless wav output will NOT be available for copying and converting to other formats.