A Lightweight Buyer-Seller Fingerprinting Protocol

A buyer-seller fingerprinting protocol can enable a seller to successfully identify a traitor from a pirated copy, while preventing the dishonest seller from framing an innocent buyer. Existing protocols often create a large computation and bandwidth overhead for two reasons: one is a lot of asymmetric ciphers operations are performed and the other is the uniquely fingerprinted copies are sent to each buyer by unicasting which is not a bandwidth efficient way. In this article, we present a lightweight buyer-seller fingerprinting protocol, in which, the asymmetric cipher operations are avoided and the uniquely fingerprinted copies generating process is shifted from the seller side to the buyer side which can avoid a high load at the seller side. Furthermore, the digital content is sent to all buyers by multicasting which can reduce the bandwidth requirement dramatically.