Digital watermarking for relational databases emerged as a candidate so- lution to provide copyright protection, tamper detection, traitor tracing, maintaining integrity of relational data. Many watermarking techniques have been proposed in the literature to address these purposes. In this paper, we survey the current state-of-the- art and we classify them according to their intent, the way they express the watermark, the cover type, the granularity level, and their verifiability.

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Watermarking Techniques for Relational Databases: Survey, Classification and Comparison

Advancement in information technology is playing an increasing role in the use of information systems comprising relational databases. These databases are used effectively in collaborative environments for information extraction; consequently, they are vulnerable to security threats concerning ownership rights and data tampering. Watermarking is advocated to enforce ownership rights over shared relational data and for providing a means for tackling data tampering. When ownership rights are enforced using watermarking, the underlying data undergoes certain modifications; as a result of which, the data quality gets compromised. Reversible watermarking is employed to ensure data quality along-with data recovery. However, such techniques are usually not robust against malicious attacks and do not provide any mechanism to selectively watermark a particular attribute by taking into account its role in knowledge discovery. Therefore, reversible watermarking is required that ensures; (i) watermark encoding and decoding by accounting for the role of all the features in knowledge discovery; and, (ii) original data recovery in the presence of active malicious attacks. In this paper, a robust and semi-blind reversible watermarking (RRW) technique for numerical relational data has been proposed that addresses the above objectives. Experimental studies prove the effectiveness of RRW against malicious attacks and show that the proposed technique outperforms existing ones.

RRW—A Robust and Reversible Watermarking Technique for Relational Data

Genetic algorithm and difference expansion based reversible watermarking for relational databases

Highlights? An authentication protocol is designed for a reversible watermarking using time-stamp protocol. ? The prediction-error expansion on integers technique is used to achieve reversibility. ? The watermark is detected successfully even most of watermarked relation tuples are deleted. Digital watermarking technology has been adopted lately as an effective solution to protecting the copyright of digital assets from illicit copying. Reversible watermark, which is also called invertible watermark, or erasable watermark, helps to recover back the original data after the content has been authenticated. Such reversibility is highly desired in some sensitive database applications, e.g. in military and medical data. Permanent distortion is one of the main drawbacks of the entire irreversible relational database watermarking schemes. In this paper, we design an authentication protocol based on an efficient time-stamp protocol, and we propose a blind reversible watermarking method that ensures ownership protection in the field of relational database watermarking. Whereas previous techniques have been mainly concerned with introducing permanent errors into the original data, our approach ensures one hundred percent recovery of the original database relation after the owner-specific watermark has been detected and authenticated. In the proposed watermarking method, we utilize a reversible data-embedding technique called prediction-error expansion on integers to achieve reversibility. The detection of the watermark can be completed successfully even when 95% of a watermarked relation tuples are deleted. Our extensive analysis shows that the proposed scheme is robust against various forms of database attacks, including adding, deleting, shuffling or modifying tuples or attributes.

A blind reversible method for watermarking relational databases based on a time-stamping protocol

Medical image data require strict security, confidentiality and integrity. To achieve these stringent requirements, we propose a hybrid watermarking method which embeds a robust watermark in the region of non-interest (RONI) for achieving security and confidentiality, while integrity control is achieved by inserting a fragile watermark into the region of the interest (ROI). First the information to be modified in ROI is separated and is inserted into RONI, which later is used in recovery of the original ROI. Secondly, to avoid the underflow and overflow, a location map is generated for embedding the watermark block-wise by leaving the suspected blocks. This avoids the preprocessing step of histogram modification. The image visual quality, as well as tamper localization, is evaluated. We use weighted peak signal to noise ratio for measuring image quality of watermarked images. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing hybrid watermarking techniques.

Hybrid watermarking of medical images for ROI authentication and recovery

There has been tremendous interest in watermarking multimedia content during the past two decades, mainly for proving ownership and detecting tamper. Digital fingerprinting, that deals with identifying malicious user(s), has also received significant attention. While extensive work has been carried out in watermarking of images, other multimedia objects still have enormous research potential. Watermarking database relations is one of the several areas which demand research focus owing to the commercial implications of database theft. Recently, there has been little progress in database watermarking, with most of the watermarking schemes modeled after the irreversible database watermarking scheme proposed by Agrawal and Kiernan. Reversibility is the ability to re-generate the original (unmarked) relation from the watermarked relation using a secret key. As explained in our paper, reversible watermarking schemes provide greater security against secondary watermarking attacks, where an attacker watermarks an already marked relation in an attempt to erase the original watermark. This paper proposes an improvement over the reversible and blind watermarking scheme presented in [5], identifying and eliminating a critical problem with the previous model. Experiments showing that the average watermark detection rate is around 91% even with attacker distorting half of the attributes. The current scheme provides security against secondary watermarking attacks.

Database Relation Watermarking Resilient against Secondary Watermarking Attacks

There has been significant research in the field of database watermarking recently. However, there has not been sufficient attention given to the requirement of providing reversibility (the ability to revert back to original relation from watermarked relation) and blindness (not needing the original relation for detection purpose) at the same time. This model has several disadvantages over reversible and blind watermarking (requiring only the watermarked relation and secret key from which the watermark is detected and the original relation is restored) including the inability to identify the rightful owner in case of successful secondary watermarking, the inability to revert the relation to the original data set (required in high precision industries) and the requirement to store the unmarked relation at a secure secondary storage. To overcome these problems, we propose a watermarking scheme that is reversible as well as blind. We utilize difference expansion on integers to achieve reversibility. The major advantages provided by our scheme are reversibility to a high quality original data set, rightful owner identification, resistance against secondary watermarking attacks, and no need to store the original database at a secure secondary storage. We have implemented our scheme and results show the success rate is limited to 11% even when 48% tuples are modified.

Reversible and blind database watermarking using difference expansion

Database watermarking has received significant research attention in the current decade. Although, almost all watermarking models have been either irreversible (the original relation cannot be restored from the watermarked relation) and/or non-blind (requiring original relation to detect the watermark in watermarked relation). This model has several disadvantages over reversible and blind watermarking (requiring only watermarked relation and secret key from which the watermark is detected and original relation is restored) including inability to identify rightful owner in case of successful secondary watermarking, inability to revert the relation to original data set (required in high precision industries) and requirement to store unmarked relation at a secure secondary storage. To overcome these problems, we propose a watermarking scheme that is reversible as well as blind. We utilize difference expansion on integers to achieve reversibility. The major advantages provided by our scheme are reversibility to high quality original data set, rightful owner identification, resistance against secondary watermarking attacks, and no need to store original database at a secure secondary storage.

Reversible and Blind Database Watermarking Using Difference Expansion

In the current market, extensive software development is taking place and the software industry is thriving. Major software giants have stated source code theft as a major threat to revenues. By inserting an identity-establishing watermark in the source code, a company can prove it's ownership over the source code. In this paper, we propose a watermarking scheme for C/C++ source codes by exploiting the language restrictions. If a function calls another function, the latter needs to be defined in the code before the former, unless one uses function pre-declarations. We embed the watermark in the code by imposing an ordering on the mutually independent functions by introducing bogus dependency. Removal of dependency by the attacker to erase the watermark requires extensive manual intervention thereby making the attack infeasible. The scheme is also secure against subtractive and additive attacks. Using our watermarking scheme, an n-bit watermark can be embedded in a program having n independent functions. The scheme is implemented on several sample codes and performance changes are analyzed.

Gaurav Gupta

Papers

Database Relation Watermarking Resilient against Secondary Watermarking Attacks

Reversible and blind database watermarking using difference expansion

Reversible and blind database watermarking using difference expansion

Reversible and Blind Database Watermarking Using Difference Expansion

Source Code Watermarking Based on Function Dependency Oriented Sequencing