An Efficient Anonymous Fingerprinting Protocol

Abstract

Fingerprinting schemes are technical means to discourage people from illegally redistributing the digital data they have legally purchased. These schemes enable the original merchant to identify the original users of the digital data. Anonymous fingerprinting schemes allow a seller to fingerprint information sold to a user without knowing the identity of the user and without the seller seeing the fingerprinted copy. Finding a (redistributed) fingerprinted copy enables the seller to find out and prove to third party whose copy it was. In this paper, we propose a new scheme of anonymous fingerprinting by using electronic wallet, in which, the user doesn't need making a computationally expensive zero-knowledge proof on finding a fingerprinted copy, the seller can directly determine the redistributor by a simple computation without the help of a registration authority and without making a search for the redistributor's public key in purchase record. In addition, our scheme can prevent the collusion of merchant and registration center to make false-accusation to honest users. By using electronic wallet, our scheme can be integrated with electronic payment system