Two-level fingerprinting codes

We introduce the notion of two-level fingerprinting and traceability codes. In this setting, the users are organized in a hierarchical manner by classifying them into various groups; for instance, by dividing the distribution area into several geographic regions, and collecting users from the same region into one group. Two-level fingerprinting and traceability codes have the following property: As in traditional (one-level) codes, when given an illegal copy produced by a coalition of users, the decoder identifies one of the guilty users if the coalition size is less than a certain threshold t. Moreover, even when the coalition is of a larger size s (> t), the decoder still provides partial information by tracing one of the groups containing a guilty user. We establish sufficient conditions for a code to possess the two-level traceability property. In addition, we also provide constructions for two-level fingerprinting codes and characterize the corresponding set of achievable rates.