Panasonic Corporation

Attrapadung Nuttapong

Toshihisa Nakano

Kazukuni Kobara

Hideki Imai

A copyright protection system is provided that keeps manufacturing costs down regardless of the total number of playback apparatuses belonging to the system. In this system, a device key generating unit of a key management apparatus performs a modular exponentiation operation on a random number with an inverse element of a product of predetermined prime numbers, so as to generate and distribute device keys to playback apparatuses in one-to-one correspondence. A key revocation data generating unit generates, as key revocation data, information identifying the prime numbers used by an unrevoked playback apparatus to generate a decryption key from its device key and distributes the key revocation data along with an encrypted content to each playback apparatus. Playback apparatuses each attempt to generate a description key based on the key revocation data, and only those playback apparatuses that have successfully generated a decryption key are able to decrypt the encrypted content.

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Koto-ku, Japan

Attrapadung Nuttapong