A Survey of Watermarking Security

Abstract

Abstract. Digital watermarking studies have always been driven by the improvement of robustness. Most of articles of this field deal with this criterion, presenting more and more impressive experimental assessments. Some key events in this quest are the use of spread spectrum, the invention of resynchronization schemes, the discovery of side information channel, and the formulation of the opponent actions as a game. On the contrary, security received little attention in the watermarking community. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of this recent topic. We list the typical applications which requires a secure watermarking technique. For each context, a threat analysis is purposed. This presentation allows us to illustrate all the certainties the community has on the subject, browsing all key papers. The end of the paper is devoted to what remains not clear, intuitions and future studies.

Analysis of a Zero Location based Authentication Scheme for Biomedical Images

“…With a little extra work, Attack II, on the other hand, allows one to replace an image block with a # Steps 1 Obtain watermarked image 2 Perform Z-transform to find position of roots 3 Apply a scaling factor, β to the complex conjugate roots only 4 Perform inverse Z-transform 5 Authenticate tampered image (Result: Authentication PASSED) chosen pattern without being detected. We conclude by reiterating the importance of security analysis while designing watermarking schemes [4], especially ones such as the Ho et al scheme designed for forensic analysis of biomedical images, where integrity is concerned.…”

On the Properties of Non-Media Digital Watermarking: A Review of State of the Art Techniques

“…In such circumstances, it is too strict to conclude whether the operation is malicious or innocent. Thus, the two sets overlaps, but they are never identical as attacks to security includes a broader scope than attacks to robustness and therefore, we can conclude that robustness is not sufficient for security [18]. Secondly, the security of a watermarking system depends largely on the considered application meaning that each application may require its own type of security.…”

“…In the last few decades, the watermarking security issue has become one of the main challenges facing the design of watermarking techniques and there has been criticism that many proposed watermarking security solutions are weak or not as strong as they claim [18]. Regardless of the data type, we have identified a few challenges for watermark security herein.…”

“…The contrary argument in cryptography is the Kerckhoff's principle which states that we must assume that the opponent knows the details of all aspects of the cryptosystem except for the secret key that is shared between the transmitter and receiver [16]. The adoption of Kerckhoffs' principle for a secure watermarking system is advocated by Furon et al [18]. This implies that the embedding function f is known to the adversary and therefore watermark message M is encoded by means of an encryption algorithm before embedding in a way that it is computationally infeasible for the opponent to guess the hidden codes.…”

Using additive interpolation-error expansion for reversible digital watermarking in audio signals

“…One possible solution to this problem is the watermarking technique, in which it is added an imperceptible and statistically undetectable signature to multimedia content. Watermarking has been considered as one of the techniques with capacity to solve problems such as unauthorized copying and distribution of digital materials [1].…”