New traceability codes and identification algorithm for tracing pirates

With the increasing popularity of digital products, there is a strong desire to protect the rights of owners against illegal redistribution. Traditional encryption schemes alone do not provide a comprehensive solution to digital rights management, since they do not prevent users who are authorized to use a digital product for their own use from transferring the cleartext content to unauthorized users. However, traceability schemes can be used to trace the illegitimate redistributors effectively. Two types of traceability schemes have been proposed in the literature - traceability codes (TA codes), and codes with the identifiable parent properties (IPP codes). TA codes are special IPP codes, and many TA codes implement an efficient identification algorithm which can determine at least one redistributor. However, many IPP codes are not TA codes, in which case, no efficient identification algorithms are available. In this paper, we generalize the definition of TA codes to derive a new family of traceability codes that is much larger than the family of traditional TA codes. By using existing decoding algorithms with respect to the Lee distance, an efficient identification algorithm is proposed for generalized TA codes. Furthermore, we show that the identification algorithm of generalized TA codes can find more redistributors than those of traditional TA codes. © 2008 IEEE.