Abstract

Broadcast encryption is the problem of a sending an encrypted message to a large user base such that the message can only be decrypted by a dynamically changing privileged subset. The study of broadcast encryption has become more and more important with the ever-increasing concern about copyright issues and the increasing interest in secure multicasting (over cable television and the Internet). We discuss the early broadcast-encryption results of Fiat and Naor, presenting several of their broadcast-encryption schemes. Next, we discuss Naor, Naor, and Lotspiech's subset-cover model, an abstract framework for broadcast-encryption schemes. We then discuss instances of the subset-cover model. This is followed by discussion of a method of Halevy and Shamir that improves upon NNL's best example of a subset-cover scheme. We finish with a discussion of traitor tracing -- the problem of, given an illegal decoder box, punishing the users who contributed keys to it. In particular, we focus on traitor-tracing algorithms for (some) subset-cover schemes.

Reference

Jeremy Horwitz, "A Survey of Broadcast Encryption," Manuscript, 2003.

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Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Santa Clara University


Jeremy Horwitz
Last modified: Mon Dec 27 20:59:48 PST 2004