Fragile watermarking based on incomplete cryptography for copyright protection

Abstract

In this work, a fragile watermarking method based on incomplete cryptography for copyright protection is proposed. Our proposed method solves the original content leakage problem of the conventional digital rights management (DRM) system, that is, the original contents are temporarily disclosed inside the user's system. We include the fragile watermarking into the encryption and the decryption of the digital content distribution system via network. Our method can easily control the quality of original content in order to generate the scrambled content for trial before purchasing. Then, when the watermarked content is generated, the user information is simultaneously embedded into the scrambled content. Experimental results with simulation confirmed that our proposed method is successfully applied on the standard JPEG format and it seems to be suitable for real applications.