Behavior forensics for scalable multiuser collusion: fairness versus effectiveness

Multimedia security systems involve many users with different objectives and users influence each other's performance. To have a better understanding of multimedia security systems and offer stronger protection of multimedia, behavior forensics formulate the dynamics among users and investigate how they interact with and respond to each other. This paper analyzes the behavior forensics in multimedia fingerprinting and formulates the dynamics among attackers during multi-user collusion. In particular, this paper focuses on how colluders achieve the fair play of collusion and guarantee that all attackers share the same risk (i.e., the probability of being detected). We first analyze how to distribute the risk evenly among colluders when they receive fingerprinted copies of scalable resolutions due to network and device heterogeneity. We show that generating a colluded copy of higher resolution puts more severe constraints on achieving fairness. We then analyze the effectiveness of fair collusion. Our results indicate that the attackers take a larger risk of being captured when the colluded copy has higher resolution, and they have to take this tradeoff into consideration during collusion. Finally, we analyze the collusion resistance of the scalable fingerprinting systems in various scenarios with different system requirements, and evaluate the maximum number of colluders that the fingerprinting systems can withstand