Encryption for digital content (Q357118)

The book is the result of the Ph. D. Thesis of the second author under the supervision of the first author. Hence, it is addressed to a highly specialized audience. It deals with an important cryptographic problem: Broadcast Encryption. Control issues deals with key distribution among legal receivers of encrypted broadcasts permitting efficient revocation procedures. Traitor tracing deals with the recognition of individual or colluded legal participants that transmit in an unauthorized way some restricted ciphered information. The authors treat these two problems separately at the beginning of the book, and they introduce fingerprinting codes for traitor tracing. Then they show some protocols to combine tracing and revocation and they analyze protocol robustness in a formal way. Finally they introduce an attack model called pirate evolution which is a type of subset cover scheme. Broadcast encryption can be traced to the seminal papers of Fiat and Naor in 1995, and in the last ten years Boneh, Chor and other researchers have proposed several fully collusion resistant broadcast, trace and revoke systems. The reviewed book summarizes the preious protocols and introduces interesting modifications. Nevertheless, the book is hardly readable. In a rather long and tedious way it introduces many notions without sufficient motivations, and in many parts the redaction is quite confusing, for instance they appear undefined symbols (see \(P\) at page 51) and some notions are introduced quite vaguely (see Def. 2.26, the pseudocode at page 94 and the exposition of the Boneh-Franklin Multiuser Encryption Scheme at page 119). Unfortunately, the lengthy and technical exposition fails to motivate the reader in looking for new methods in broadcast encryption.