Importance

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Abstract

A system and method for scheduling the receipt of desired movies and other forms of data from a network. Feedback paths are provided so that customer's profiles and/or the profiles of the video programs or other data may be modified to reflect actual usage. Secure digital communications between a video head end and a customer's set top terminal in the feedback path is provided by generating, at the video head end, a seed random number N for seeding a random number generator of the customer's set top terminal, encrypting seed random number N using a public key algorithm using a public key P of the video head end to yield encrypted seed random number E(N,P), sending the encrypted seed random number E(N,P) to the customer's set top terminal, decrypting the encrypted seed random number E(N,P) at the customer's set top terminal using a private key of the customer's set top terminal to yield seed random number N, generating a first number for each number i in a sequence K.sub.i at the customer's set top terminal and logically exclusive-ORing the first number in the sequence K.sub.i with a first data word in the decrypted data stream P.sub.i from the video head end, thereby forming a data stream C.sub.i, sending the result C.sub.i from the customer's set top terminal to the video head end, and decrypting C.sub.i to yield a decrypted P.sub.i by logically exclusive-ORing sequence K.sub.i with C.sub.i.

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First Claim