The protection of digital content from misappropriation and unauthorized propagation and modification is a desired requirement for digital products. This book provides several cryptographic mechanisms for protecting digital content.
The first three chapters introduce three basic cryptographic mechanisms for different digital content distribution security issues: “Fingerprinting Codes” addresses the source identification issue in digital content distribution; “Broadcast Encryption” addresses the distribution control issue in digital content distribution; and “Traitor Tracing” addresses the source identification issue in the context of decryption algorithms. The next two chapters focus on two advanced topics: the combination of tracing and revocation in various content distribution settings, and pirate evolution--a practical attack against trace and revoke schemes.
With the necessary prerequisites, even readers with no prior knowledge of cryptography can gain a basic understanding of this field. Each chapter defines the security requirement, introduces some concrete implementation examples, and proves the security of these schemes. Also, each chapter ends with a detailed bibliographic note, which is useful for further study.
The book is based in part on Pehlivanoglu’s doctoral thesis, which implies that it will provide a state-of-the-art overview of encryption for digital content. If I could change one thing, I would have added a conclusion before the references.
Overall, I recommend this survey of digital content encryption for cryptographers and professional engineers.