Improving collusion resistance of error correcting code based multimedia fingerprinting

Digital fingerprinting protects multimedia content from illegal redistribution by uniquely marking copies of the content distributed to each user. Collusion is a powerful attack whereby several differently fingerprinted copies of the same content are combined together to attenuate or remove the fingerprints. Focusing on the error correction code (ECC) based fingerprinting, we explore in this paper new avenues that can substantially improve its collusion resistance, and in the mean time retain its advantages in detection complexity and fast distribution. Our analysis suggests a great need of jointly considering the coding, embedding, and detection issues, and inspires the proposed technique of permuted subsegment embedding that is able to substantially improve the collusion resistance of ECC based fingerprinting.