Universal Fingerprinting: Capacity and Random-Coding Exponents

This paper studies fingerprinting (traitor tracing) games in which the number of colluders and the collusion channel are unknown. The fingerprints are embedded into host sequences representing signals to be protected and provide the receiver with the capability to trace back pirated copies to the colluders. The colluders and the fingerprint embedder are subject to signal fidelity constraints. Our problem setup unifies the signal-distortion and Boneh-Shaw formulations of fingerprinting. The fundamental tradeoffs between fingerprint codelength, number of users, number of colluders, fidelity constraints, and decoding reliability are then determined. Several bounds on fingerprinting capacity have been presented in recent literature. This paper derives exact capacity formulas and presents a new randomized fingerprinting scheme with the following properties: (1) the encoder and receiver assume a nominal coalition size but do not need to know the actual coalition size and the collusion channel; (2) a tunable parameter $\Delta$ trades off false-positive and false-negative error exponents; (3) the receiver provides a reliability metric for its decision; and (4) the scheme is capacity-achieving when the false-positive exponent $\Delta$ tends to zero and the nominal coalition size coincides with the actual coalition size. A fundamental component of the new scheme is the use of a "time-sharing" randomized sequence. The decoder is a maximum penalized mutual information decoder, where the significance of each candidate coalition is assessed relative to a threshold, and the penalty is proportional to the coalition size. A much simpler {\em threshold decoder} that satisfies properties (1)---(3) above but not (4) is also given.