We give a generic divide-and-conquer approach for constructing collusion-resistant probabilistic dynamic traitor tracing schemes with larger alphabets from schemes with smaller alphabets. This construction offers a linear tradeoff between the alphabet size and the codelength. In particular, we show that applying our results to the binary dynamic Tardos scheme of leads to schemes that are shorter by a factor equal to half the alphabet size. Asymptotically, these codelengths correspond, up to a constant factor, to the fingerprinting capacity for static probabilistic schemes. This gives a hierarchy of probabilistic dynamic traitor tracing schemes, and bridges the gap between the low bandwidth, high codelength scheme of and the high bandwidth, low codelength scheme of Fiat and Tassa.
We study a fingerprinting game in which the number of colluders and the collusion channel are unknown. The encoder embeds fingerprints into a host sequence and provides the decoder with the capability to trace back pirated copies to the colluders. Fingerprinting capacity has recently been derived as the limit value of a sequence of maximin games with mutual information as their payoff functions. However, these games generally do not admit saddle-point solutions and are very hard to solve numerically. Here under the so-called Boneh-Shaw marking assumption, we reformulate the capacity as the value of a single two-person zero-sum game, and show that it is achieved by a saddle-point solution. If the maximal coalition size is k and the fingerprinting alphabet is binary, we show that capacity decays quadratically with k. Furthermore, we prove rigorously that the asymptotic capacity is 1 (k221n2) and we confirm our earlier conjecture that Tardos' choice of the arcsine distribution asymptotically maximizes the mutual information payoff function while the interleaving attack minimizes it. Along with the asymptotics, numerical solutions to the game for small k are also presented. We construct binary codes for fingerprinting digital documents. Our codes for n users that are e-secure against c pirates have length O(c2log(n e)). This improves the codes proposed by Boneh and Shaw l1998r whose length is approximately the square of this length. The improvement carries over to works using the Boneh--Shaw code as a primitive, for example, to the dynamic traitor tracing scheme of Tassa l2005r. By proving matching lower bounds we establish that the length of our codes is best within a constant factor for reasonable error probabilities. This lower bound generalizes the bound found independently by l2003r that applies to a limited class of codes. Our results also imply that randomized fingerprint codes over a binary alphabet are as powerful as over an arbitrary alphabet and the equal strength of two distinct models for fingerprinting. We compute the channel capacity of non-binary fingerprinting under the Marking Assumption, in the limit of large coalition size c. The solution for the binary case was found by Huang and Moulin. They showed that asymptotically, the capacity is 1 (c22 ln 2), the interleaving attack is optimal and the arcsine distribution is the optimal bias distribution. In this paper we prove that the asymptotic capacity for general alphabet size q is (q - 1) (c22 lnq). Our proof technique does not reveal the optimal attack or bias distribution. The fact that the capacity is an increasing function of q shows that there is a real gain in going to non-binary alphabets. Fingerprinting capacity has recently been derived as the value of a two-person zero-sum game. In this work, we study fingerprinting capacity games with k pirates under the ˇ combined digit model proposed by For small k, capacities along with optimal strategies for both players of the game are obtained explicitly. For large k, we extend our earlier asymptotic analysis for the binary alphabet to this general model and show that capacity is asymptotic to A k2 where the constant A is identified. Saddle-point solutions to the functional maximin game are obtained using methods of variational calculus.