Wayland Secure Output Protocol Proposed For Upstream - HDCP-Like Behavior

Collabora developer Scott Anderson sent out a "request for comments" patch series that would add a Secure Output Protocol to the Wayland space.

The Secure Output Protocol is for allowing a Wayland client to tell the compositor to only display if it's going to a "secure" output, such as for HDCP-like (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) configurations, but there is no mandate at the protocol level about what is the definition of secure -- if anything.

This does not impose any DRM per se by Wayland but is mostly intended for set-top-boxes and other closed systems where a Wayland client can reasonably trust the compositor. The Wayland Secure Output Protocol is based upon the work done by Google on their Chromium Wayland code.

This is just one of several Chromium Wayland extensions that Collabora has been working to upstream with other recent ones like the Alpha Compositing protocol and Explicit Synchronization.

More details on the proposed Wayland Secure Output protocol can be found via this mailing list post.