Towards robust and secure watermarking

Abstract

This paper presents yet another attempt towards robust and secure watermarking. Some recent works have looked at this issue first designing new watermarking schemes with a security oriented point of view, and then evaluating their robustness compared to state-of-the-art but unsecure techniques. Our approach is, on contrary, to start from a very robust watermarking technique and to propose changes in order to strengthen its security levels. These changes include the introduction of a security criterion, an embedding process implemented as a maximization of a robustness metric under the perceptual and the security constraints, and a watermarking detection seen as a contrario decision test.Our experimentations lead to, once again, a trade-off between security and robustness. The technique is now perfectly secure against attacks mounted during the second edition of the BOWS challenge, but the price to pay is either a lower robustness against common image processing, either a bigger probability of false alarm.

Optimal Transport for Secure Spread-Spectrum Watermarking of Still Images

“…A constraint receiving more and more attention in watermarking nowadays is the security constraint, defined as "the inability by unauthorized users to have access to the raw watermarking channel" by Kalker [10] and linked with the presence of an adversary [11]- [16]. Watermarking schemes then are required to respect the Kerckhoffs' principle [17] (i.e.…”

“…The Kerckhoffs' principle comes from cryptography and cryptanalysis but is also widely used in watermarking [20], [21] or in other forms of data-hiding like steganography [22]- [24]. However, watermarking security analysis shows that an adversary may estimate the secret if he owns a sufficient number of marked contents and if the embedding scheme is not secure [11]- [16]. According to the degree of estimation of the secret, the adversary would be able to erase, modify or copy the embedded message to another host content.…”