When intellectual properties are distributed over a broadcast network, the content is usually encrypted in a way such that only authorized users who have a certain set of keys, can decrypt the content. Some authorized users may be willing to disclose their keys in constructing a pirate decoder which allows illegitimate users to access the content. It is desirable to determine the source of the keys in a pirate decoder, once one is captured. Traitor tracing schemes were introduced to help solve this problem. A traitor tracing scheme usually consists of: a scheme to generate and distribute each user's personal key, a cryptosystem used to protect session keys that are used to encrypt/decrypt the actual content, and a tracing algorithm to determine one source of the keys in a pirate decoder. In this thesis, we survey the traitor tracing schemes that have been suggested. We group the schemes into two groups: symmetric in which the session key is encrypted and decrypted using the same key and asymmetric schemes in which the session key is encrypted and decrypted using different keys. We also explore the possibility of a truly public scheme in which the data supplier knows the encryption keys only. A uniform analysisis presented on the efficiency of these schemes using a set of performance parameters
