Cyber-attacks are evolving at a disturbing rate. Data breaches, ransomware attacks, crypto-jacking, malware and phishing attacks are now rampant. In this era of cyber warfare, the software industry is also growing with an increasing number of software being used in all domains of life. This evolution has added to the problems of software vendors and users where they have to prevent a wide range of attacks. Existing watermark detection solutions have a low detection rate in the software. In order to address this issue, this paper proposes a novel blind Zero code based Watermark detection approach named KeySplitWatermark, for the protection of software against cyber-attacks. The algorithm adds watermark logically into the code utilizing the inherent properties of code and gives a robust solution. The embedding algorithm uses keywords to make segments of the code to produce a key-dependent on the watermark. The extraction algorithms use this key to remove watermark and detect tampering. When tampering increases to a certain user-defined threshold, the original software code is restored making it resilient against attacks. KeySplitWatermark is evaluated on tampering attacks on three unique samples with two distinct watermarks. The outcomes show that the proposed approach reports promising results against cyber-attacks that are powerful and viable. We compared the performance of our proposal with state-of-the-art works using two different software codes. Our results depict that KeySplitWatermark correctly detects watermarks, resulting in up to 15.95 and 17.43 percent reduction in execution time on given code samples with no increase in program size and independent of watermark size.

KeySplitWatermark: Zero Watermarking Algorithm for Software Protection Against Cyber-Attacks

With the widespread growth of medical images and improved communication and computer technologies in recent years, authenticity of the images has been a serious issue for E-health applications. In order to this, various notable watermarking techniques are developed by potential researchers. However, those techniques are unable to solve many issues that are necessary to be measured in future investigations. This paper surveys various watermarking techniques in medical domain. Along with the survey, general concepts of watermarking, major characteristics, recent applications, concepts of embedding and recovery process of watermark, and the summary of various techniques (in tabular form) are highlighted in brief. Further, major issues associated with medical image watermarking are also discussed to find out research directions for fledgling researchers and developers.

Watermarking techniques for medical data authentication: a survey

Digital image authentication is an extremely significant concern for the digital revolution, as it is easy to tamper with any image. In the last few decades, it has been an urgent concern for researchers to ensure the authenticity of digital images. Based on the desired applications, several suitable watermarking techniques have been developed to mitigate this concern. However, it is tough to achieve a watermarking system that is simultaneously robust and secure. This paper gives details of standard watermarking system frameworks and lists some standard requirements that are used in designing watermarking techniques for several distinct applications. The current trends of digital image watermarking techniques are also reviewed in order to find the state-of-the-art methods and their limitations. Some conventional attacks are discussed, and future research directions are given.

https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/11/2/110/pdf

Digital Image Watermarking Techniques: A Review

Image watermarking schemes based on singular value decomposition (SVD) have become popular due to a good trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility. However, the false positive problem (FPP) is the main drawback of SVD-based watermarking schemes. The singular value is the main cause of FPP issues because it a fixed value that does not hold structural information of an image. In this paper, a new SVD-based image watermarking scheme that uses a chaotic map is proposed to overcome this issue. The secret key is first extracted from both the host and watermark image. This key is used to generate a new chaotic matrix and chaotic multiple scaling factors (CMSF) to increase the sensitivity of the proposed scheme. The watermark image is then transformed based on the chaotic matrix before being directly embedded into the singular value of the host image by using the CMSF. The extracted secret key is unique to the host and the watermark images, which improves security and overcomes FPP issues. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme fulfils all watermarking requirements in terms of robustness, imperceptibility, security, and payload. Furthermore, it achieves high robustness with different scaling factors, and outperforms several existing schemes.

/pdf/a-new-chaotic-image-watermarking-scheme-based-on-svd-and-iwt-3unyoyd81j.pdf

A New Chaotic Image Watermarking Scheme Based on SVD and IWT

Machine learning based blind color image watermarking scheme for copyright protection

In this paper, a novel robust color image watermarking method based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is proposed. In this method, RGB cover image is divided into red, green and blue components. DCT and DWT are applied to each color components. Grayscale watermark image is scrambled by using Arnold transform. DCT is performed to the scrambled watermark image. Transformed watermark image is then divided into equal smaller parts. DCT coefficients of each watermark parts are embedded into four DWT bands of the color components of the cover image. The robustness of the proposed color image watermarking has been demonstrated by applying various image processing operations such as rotating, resizing, filtering, jpeg compression, and noise adding to the watermarked images. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to the linear and nonlinear attacks and the transparency of the watermarked images has been protected.

A novel hybrid DCT and DWT based robust watermarking algorithm for color images

Son yillarda internet ve mobil teknolojilerin gelismesi ile birlikte, coklu-ortam dokumanlarinin telif hakkinin korunmasi onem kazanmistir. Sayisal goruntu ve video gibi coklu-ortam dokumanlarinin korunmasinda sayisal damgalama en cok kullanilan yontem olmustur. Bu calismada, Ayrik Kosinus Donusumu, Ayrik Dalgacik Donusumu (ADD) ve Arnold Donusumu kullanilarak gri-seviyeli goruntu damgalama yontemi onerilmistir. Bu damgalama yonteminde eklenecek damgalar dort esit parcalara ayrilmistir. Saldirilara karsi damgalama yonteminin dayanikliligini artirmak icin bu parcalarin her biri damga eklenecek goruntulerin ADD islemi sonucunda elde edilen dort ayri bantlarinin farkli alt bolgelerine gizlenmistir. ADD frekans uzayinda farkli alt bolgelere damga ekleme isleminde onerilen gri-seviyeli damgalama yonteminin basarimi damgalanmis goruntulere dogrusal ve dogrusal olmayan saldirilar uygulanarak degerlendirilmistir. Bu calismada ayrica onerilen yontem ile temel alcak frekans bandina damga ekleme yontemi karsilastirilmistir. Deneysel sonuclar onerilen yontemin saldirilara karsi dayanikli oldugunu gostermistir. Bununla birlikte damgalanmis goruntulerin kalitelerinin korundugu da gorulmustur.

/pdf/coklu-goruntu-damgalama-yonteminde-farkli-frekans-5azl0v91xo.pdf

Çoklu Görüntü Damgalama Yönteminde Farklı Frekans Bölgelerinin Değerlendirilmesi

In recent years, due to the development of computer, internet and mobile technologies the copyright protection of the multimedia documents such as digital audio, image and video has become important. Digital watermarking has become the most popular method for protecting multimedia documents. In this work, a novel robust image watermarking method based on Discrete Cosine Transform, Discrete Wavelet Transform and Arnold Transform is presented. The experiment results show that the proposed method is robust against different attacks.

Ahmed Khaleel Abdulrahman

Papers

A novel hybrid DCT and DWT based robust watermarking algorithm for color images

Çoklu Görüntü Damgalama Yönteminde Farklı Frekans Bölgelerinin Değerlendirilmesi

Ayrik kosinüs dönüşümü ve ayrik dalgacik dönüşümü tabanli Çoklu resim damgalama yöntemi