An efficient fingerprinting scheme with secret sharing

Abstract

The illegal copying and redistribution of digital data is a crucial problem to distributors who electronically sell digital data. Fingerprinting scheme is a technique which allows the copyright protection to track redistributors of digital data using cryptographic techniques. Anonymous fingerprinting scheme prevents the merchant from framing a buyer by making the fingerprinted version known to the buyer only. In addition, such a scheme makes it possible for the buyer to purchase goods without revealing his identity to the merchant. In this paper, an efficient anonymous fingerprinting scheme based on secret sharing is introduced. A secret sharing scheme preserves the buyer's anonymity and traceability of traitor. When the buyer purchases a digital data, the buyer's identity is divided into two shares and two shares are embedded into the digital data. When the merchant finds a sold version that has been illegally distributed, he is able to retrieve the fingerprint and find the original buyer's identity by reconstructing it from two shares. When the merchant embeds the fingerprint in the digital data, the protocol uses the homomorphic encryption scheme for practicability. Plus, the digital signature prevents the buyer from denying allegations.