Abstract: The present invention provides a means and an apparatus for watermarking a digital signal. A particular content which is to be made available by a content provider to potential content users is prepared by encoding the content into a plurality of encoded streams, each encoded stream being encoded according to a different bit-rate. Each encoded stream comprises a plurality of chunks and each chunk is retrievable by a requestor of content. Upon request of said content by a user, the plurality of chunks making up the content are selected from the plurality of the different encoded streams and a subset from that plurality of chunks is watermarked using a unique identifying parameter associated with the requestor.

Abstract: There is a need in the computer software and data industries to protect content from unauthorized access to private information. Alphanumeric passwords have been shown to offer very weak protection. Biometrics (personal traits such as fingerprints and hand-written signatures) offer superior protection, but still have a number of weaknesses. The most significant weakness is that there is no existing way to protect the stored biometric data itself; and once a person's fingerprint data has been obtained by an attacker, the use of that fingerprint can no longer be considered secure. The invention solves the problem by securing the access software application that manages the biometric data using tamper-resistant encoding techniques. These tamper-resistant encoding techniques include: data-flow, control-flow, mass-data and white-box encoding.

Abstract: There is a need in the computer software and data industries to protect content from unauthorized access to private information. Alphanumeric passwords have been shown to offer very weak protection. Biometrics (personal traits such as fingerprints and hand-written signatures) offer superior protection, but still have a number of weaknesses. The most significant weakness is that there is no existing way to protect the stored biometric data itself; and once a person's fingerprint data has been obtained by an attacker, the use of that fingerprint can no longer be considered secure. The invention solves the problem by securing the access software application that manages the biometric data using tamper-resistant encoding techniques. These tamper-resistant encoding techniques include: data-flow, control-flow, mass-data and white-box encoding.