A Buyer-Friendly and Mediated Watermarking Protocol for Web Context

Abstract

Watermarking protocols are used in conjunction with digital watermarking techniques to protect digital copyright on the Internet. They define the schemes of the web transactions by which buyers can purchase protected digital content distributed by content providers in a secure manner. Over the last few years, significant examples of watermarking protocols have been proposed in literature. However, a detailed examination of such protocols has revealed a number of problems that have to be addressed in order to make them suited for current web context. Therefore, based on the most relevant problems derived from literature, this article identifies the main challenges posed by the development of watermarking protocols for web context and presents a watermarking protocol that follows a new secure, buyer-centric and mediated design approach able to meet such challenges.

A Watermarking Protocol Based on Blockchain

“…Most of the watermarking protocols documented in the literature do not exploit blockchain technology, but they are based on the well-known "buyer and seller" protection schemes and their variants characterized by the absence of TTPs. They are widely described and discussed in [5,[22][23][24]. Some of them also inspire the so-called DRM (digital rights management) systems, which are complex web platforms that adopt specific technologies and interaction schemes to enable the copyright protection of digital content on the Internet [32,33].…”

“…In particular, digital watermarking is mainly used to provide content tracking by fingerprinting. However, such DRM systems do not implement protection schemes able to address the peculiar problems that affect watermarking protocols, such as the "customer's right problem" or the "unbinding problem" [4,11,22]. As a consequence, once content is downloaded and tampered, there is no legal way to prove the ownership of the content and to trace who should be responsible for copyright infringement.…”

“…As a consequence, a number of watermarking protocols are based on "simplified" interaction schemes that do not exploit WCAs [17][18][19][20][21]. Such approaches appear to be more secure, but they turn out to be impracticable in the current web context, since they are characterized by interaction schemes that force buyers to perform complex security actions to complete content purchase transactions [22].…”

“…The watermarking protocols described in [22][23][24] attempt to overcome the drawbacks affecting previous solutions existing in the literature by proposing a new "buyer friendly" and "mediated" design approach. Such an approach reintroduces the TTP, but its role is carefully limited to a restricted part of the protocol, so as to enable a simplified participation of buyers in the content purchase transactions without reducing the security level of the protocol.…”

“…This paper presents a new watermarking protocol based on blockchain technology. The protocol is built on the experiences previously conducted with the protocols documented in [22][23][24], and follows the buyer friendly and mediated design approach. The main aim is to simplify the interaction scheme of the protocol by exploiting the blockchain technology, which makes it possible to better control the involvement of the TTP in the protocol.…”