A note on the limits of collusion-resistant watermarks

  • Authors:
  • Funda Ergun;Joe Kilian;Ravi Kumar

  • Affiliations:
  • Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ;NEC Research Institute, Princeton, NJ;IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA

  • Venue:
  • EUROCRYPT'99 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Theory and application of cryptographic techniques
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

In one proposed use of digital watermarks, the owner of a document D sells slightly different documents, D1;D2;,... to each buyer; if a buyer posts his/her document Di to the web, the owner can identify the source of the leak. More general attacks are however possible in which k buyers create some composite document D*; the goal of the owner is to identify at least one of the conspirators. We show, for a reasonable model of digital watermarks, fundamental limits on their efficacy against collusive attacks. In particular, if the effective document length is n, then at most O(√n= ln n) adversaries can defeat any watermarking scheme. Our attack is, in the theoretical model, oblivious to the watermarking scheme being used; in practice, it uses very little information about the watermarking scheme. Thus, using a proprietary system seems to give only a very weak defense.