Improved upper bounds for wide-sense frameproof codes

Abstract

Frameproof codes have been extensively studied for many years due to their application in copyright protection and their connection to extremal set theory. In this paper, we investigate upper bounds on the cardinality of wide-sense $t$-frameproof codes. For $t=2$, we apply results from Sperner theory to give a better upper bound, which significantly improves a recent bound by Zhou and Zhou. For $t\geq 3$, we provide a general upper bound by establishing a relation between wide-sense frameproof codes and cover-free families. Finally, when the code length $n$ is at most $\frac{15+\sqrt{33}}{24}(t-1)^2$, we show that a wide-sense $t$-frameproof code has at most $n$ codewords, and the unique optimal code consists of all weight-one codewords. As byproducts, our results improve several best known results on binary $t$-frameproof codes.