English

Good traceability codes do exist

Information Theory 2016-02-29 v2 math.IT

Abstract

Traceability codes are combinatorial objects introduced by Chor, Fiat and Naor in 1994 to be used to trace the origin of digital content in traitor tracing schemes. Let FF be an alphabet set of size qq and nn be a positive integer. A tt-traceability code is a code CFn\mathscr{C}\subseteq F^n which can be used to catch at least one colluder from a collusion of at most tt traitors. It has been shown that tt-traceability codes do not exist for qtq\le t. When q>t2q>t^2, tt-traceability codes with positive code rate can be constructed from error correcting codes with large minimum distance. Therefore, Barg and Kabatiansky asked in 2004 that whether there exist tt-traceability codes with positive code rate for t+1qt2t+1\le q\le t^2. In 2010, Blackburn, Etzion and Ng gave an affirmative answer to this question for qt2t/2+1q\ge t^2-\lceil t/2\rceil+1, using the probabilistic methods. However, they did not see how their probabilistic methods can be used to answer this question for the remaining values of qq. They even suspected that there may be a `Plotkin bound' of traceability codes that forbids the existence of such codes. In this paper, we give a complete answer to Barg-Kabatiansky's question (in the affirmative). Surprisingly, our construction is deterministic.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1601.04810,
  title  = {Good traceability codes do exist},
  author = {Gennian Ge and Chong Shangguan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.04810},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to a crucial error in the proof of Lemma 2.6

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:32:22.677Z