Tracing and Revoking Pirate Rebroadcasts

Abstract

All content distribution systems are vulnerable to the attack of rebroadcasting: in a pirate rebroadcast a pirate publishes the content in violation of the licensing agreement. This attack defeats any tracing mechanism that requires interaction with the pirate decoder for identifying compromised keys. Merely tracing pirate rebroadcasts is of little use and one should be also able to revoke the involved traitor keys. The only currently known scheme addressing this issue is implemented as part of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) used in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD disks. In this paper we perform an analysis of this construction and we find it has serious limitations: the number of revocations is bound by the size of the receiver storage (for the actual parameters reported this is merely 85 keys).We address the limitations of the state of the art (i) by formally modeling the problem of tracing and revoking pirate rebroadcasts and (ii) by presenting the first efficient constructions of tracing and revoking pirate rebroadcasts that are capable of performing tracing for unlimited numbers of traitors and revoking unlimited numbers of users. We present three instantiations of our framework: our first construction achieves a linear communication overhead in the number of revoked users and traitors and is capable of eliminating a pirate rebroadcast by any number of traitors in time that depends logarithmically in the number of users and polynomially on the number of revocations and traitors. Our second construction assumes a fixed bound on the number of traitors and improves the elimination time to depend only logarithmically on the number of revocations. Both of these constructions require merely a binary marking alphabet. Our third construction utilizes a larger marking alphabet and achieves even faster pirate rebroadcast elimination; our analysis improves the previously known bound for the same alphabet size due to Fiat and Tassa from Crypto’99 while offering revocation explicitly.KeywordsCommunication OverheadUnlimited NumberAlphabet SizeBroadcast EncryptionDynamic TraitorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.