Renewable Traitor Tracing: A Broadcast, Tracing and Revoke System for Anonymous Attack

In this paper we design encryption schemes for combating piracy in mass distribution of copyrighted materials. When a pirated copy of some copyrighted material or an illegal decryption device is found, the scheme could identify at least one of the real users (traitors) who participate in the construction of the pirated content/device. More importantly, once the attackers are identified, the keys that have been used in the piracy can be revoked.

We start by briefly showing our traitor tracing scheme that can be used to defend against anonymous attack where the forensic evience is the pirated content or per-content decryption key. Content is divided into multiple segments and each segment comes with multiple variations. Each user can only play back one variation through the content.

We will then focus on integrating broadcast revocation capability into our tracing scheme. When traitors are identified, the enhanced scheme can revoke and exclude the decryption keys used by the traitors during piracy. The revocation information will be included in the newly released content, which will disallow the devices owned by traitors to playback the newly released content.

We believe this renewability is essential for a tracing scheme to be useful in a real system. Revocation is a natural next step after tracing to make it a complete system. Our trace and revoke scheme has been the first commercial use of a traitor tracing technology within the AACS 1 (Advanced Access Content System) content protection standards for next generation high-definition video optical disc.

By: Hongxia Jin; Jeffery Lotspiech

Published in: RJ10394 in 2006

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