Traitor tracing for anonymous attack in content protection

Abstract

In this paper we take a closer look at traitor tracing in the context of content protection, especially for anonymous attack where the attackers pirate the content and re-distribute the decrypted plain content. When the pirated copies are recovered, traitor tracing is a forensic technology that can identify the original users (called traitors) who have participated in the pirate attack and involved in the construction of the pirated copy of the content. In current state-of-art, traitor tracing scheme assumes a maximum coalition size of traitors in the system and is defined to detect one traitor, assuming the detected traitor can be disconnected and tracing just repeats with the remaining traitors. In this position paper we argue this definition does not sufficiently reflect the reality where a traitor tracing technology is used to defend against piracy especially in the context of content protection. We believe a traitor tracing scheme should deduce the active coalition size and should be defined to detect all active traitors even taking into consideration that found traitors need to be technically disabled. We believe the traditional definition misleads in the design of an efficient and practical traitor tracing schemes while our definition much better fits the reality and can lead to design of efficient traitor tracing schemes for real world use.