On error-correcting fingerprinting codes for use with watermarking

Digital fingerprinting has been suggested for copyright protection. Using a watermarking scheme, a fingerprint identifying the buyer is embedded in every copy sold. If an illegal copy appears, it can be traced back to the guilty user. By using collusion-secure codes, the fingerprinting system is made secure against cut-and-paste attacks. In this paper we study the interface between the collusion-secure fingerprinting codes and the underlying watermarking scheme, and we construct several codes which are both error-correcting and collusion-secure. Error-correction makes the system robust against successful attacks on the watermarking layer.