Proxy certificates-based digital fingerprinting scheme for mobile communication

Protection of intellectual property in digital contents has been a subject of research for many years and led to the development of various techniques. Digital fingerprinting scheme is an important class of these techniques. The goal of fingerprinting scheme is to deter people from illegally redistributing digital data. But, the problem of known anonymous fingerprinting schemes is that, being based on computationally unspecified black boxes: secure multiparty computation or minimum disclosure proofs of knowledge. Their complexity is much too high to be implemental in real application. Still less, buyer's memory and computation power is very small in mobile communication. We present an anonymous fingerprinting scheme for mobile communication using mobile agent, which is efficient and feasible from a practical view. The basic primitive used is a proxy certificates. Our proposal satisfies that (1) only the buyer can know the fingerprinted copy however the mobile agent executes its computations instead of him/her, and (2) it reduces amount of the buyer's computations to the minimum and risk about exposure of the buyer's private information which will be occurred owing to delegation.