SUMMARY
In asymmetric fingerprinting, the merchant can trace the traitors from a pirated multimedia content copy by means of the embedded unique fingerprint, while the customer is immune of being framed due to the asymmetric property. The existing schemes are inefficient in practice due to their high bandwidth usage. This paper proposes an asymmetric fingerprinting scheme that is efficient from the bandwidth usage point of view. First, multicast an efficient transport technology for one‐to‐many communication is exploited, which can reduce the bandwidth usage significantly. Second, symmetric encryption instead of public‐key encryption is performed on the multimedia content, which can also reduce the complexity and communication cost. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.