[362] in WWW Security List Archive
Re: Information identifiers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wm A Carpenter)
Mon Jan 30 22:22:46 1995
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 17:39:02 -0600
To: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
From: wcarpent@mitre.org (Wm A Carpenter)
Reply-To: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
Nick,
Just a quick question -- why "at least log2(the number of customers)"?
>> As I understand the idea (and this could be wrong), a copyright item
>> would be placed on the net encoded in some way so that the copyright
>> ownership was clearly identifiable, no matter how small a (decodable)
>> slice of the item you take.
>
>A bit of reflection will reveal that this is mathematically
>impossible. The amount of information so encode must be at
>least log2(the number of customers). More importantly,
>these must be "noise" bits that can be flipped without
>alterring the semantics of the document, yet be semantically
>undifferentiable to the copiers. None of the proposed schemes
>have solved this fundamental semantic hiding problem. A copier
>can simply determine which bits do not change the semantics of
>the document, flip them all randomly. and redistribute the
>document.
>
>Also, these schemes often assume that once the customer is identified,
>law enforcement can be invoked. But in fact "data piracy", aka
>the free copying of information regardless of origin, is perfectly
>legal in some jurisdictions on the Internet, and the laws are
>not enforced in many other such jurisdictions. Furthermore,
>both law enforcement and blacklists assumes that e-mail addresses can
>be traced to actual persons, but there is no strong True Name
>authentication on the Internet, and such a scheme will never
>become universal, for a variety of reasons. Finally, the
>customer targeted by the fingerprint might simply be an
>innocent victim of an untraceable thief, or could plausibly
>claim to be so.
>
>Nick Szabo szabo@netcom.com
*
Wm A (Bill) Carpenter email: wcarpent@mitre.org
The MITRE Corporation, W033
7525 Colshire Drive, MS W548 Phone: 703 883-5777
McLean, VA 22102 <USA> FAX: 703 883-3308
