Institute for Integrative Nutrition

The app offers all the educational content offline as well as online. Users can download the PDF files with lecture content as well as the Audio and Video files to enjoy the courses in full even if not in range. Our client encountered a problem after broadening their reach to Android device users. While on iOS app content is not accessible outside of the app itself and it requires certain level of know how and skill to gain unauthorized access to app’s data. On Android app’s data is easily accessible with a simple file browser. This provided an opportunity to copy the lecture materials from the device and share online. Client required a solution that would encrypt their materials quickly but still allow for seamless playback of the materials on the device.

We needed a fully custom encryption algorithm that would make all the video and audio files unusable outside of the application and take constant very small amount of time to encrypt and decrypt files even for very large files. After an in-depth study of the file formats the lectures were stored in, our engineers found the critical sections of the video and audio file headers that needed encryption to render the entire file useless. This section was only 128 bytes long and after encryption, the files were unplayable and extremely hard to fix.

We’ve run many video fixing programs on encrypted files all failed to recover the content. We’ve implemented the algorithm inside the application where files were encrypted during the download process then the headers where decrypted for playback when needed without a possibility to copy unencrypted content at any time.