Traitor Tracing for Multimedia Forensics

Abstract

This chapter discusses the cryptographic traitor tracing technology that is used to defend against piracy in multimedia content distribution. It talks about different potential pirate attacks in a multimedia content distribution system. It discusses how traitor tracing technologies can be used to defend against those attacks by identifying the attackers involved in the piracy. While traitor tracing has been a long standing cryptographic problem that has attracted extensive research, the main purpose of this chapter is to show how to overcome many practical concerns in order to bring a theoretical solution to practice. Many of these practical concerns have been overlooked in academic research. The author brings firsthand experience on bringing this technology to practice in the context of new industry standards on content protection for next generation high-definition DVDs. The author also hopes to shed new insightson future research directions in this space.