Video game watermarking

Abstract

The publishers of video games suffer from illegal piracy and information leakage caused by end-consumers, "release groups"or insiders shortly after or even before the official release of a new video game. Mechanisms to prevent or at least postpone this illegal redistribution are DRM or copy protection mechanisms. However, these mechanisms are very unpopular, because they restrict the customers in playing the game and demand a high administration effort from the developers and/or distributors. Even worse, most copy protection mechanisms have proven to be insecure as "patches" for circumvention usually are available quickly and easy to get. To satisfy the challenges of security and usability, this work introduces the idea of using digital watermarking to protect all available and suitable media types and software binaries contained in a video game. A three-layered watermarking deployment approach along the production chain is proposed to detect leakage in the release phas e as well as during the development process of a boxed video game. The proposed approach features both copyright watermarking and collusion secure fingerprints embedded as transaction watermark messages in components of video games. We discuss the corresponding new challenges and opportunities. In addition, a prototype watermarking algorithm is presented to demonstrate the adaption necessity of classical image watermarking when applied to video games to satisfies the requirements for transparency, security as well as performance.The watermark capacity is significantly increased while inter-media and inter-file embedding is enabled and the associated synchronization challenge is solved by robust hashes

Watermarking textures in video games

“…Conforming to the special watermarking requirements in video game applications [3], new requirements and challenges for watermarking texture files are listed as follows.…”

“…Consequently the impact on the robustness caused by DXTn compression is not controllable. Furthermore, the embedding process in most algorithms is not separable and scalable, which makes them unsuitable for watermark container technique and distributed embedding for an image set [3].…”

“…Seen as a special kind of multimedia, a video game is a composition of different sets of multimedia files, including textures, audio files, 3D-models, user manuals, videos, etc. [3]. Among these files, the textures play an important role in video games.…”

“…Regarding security requirements, collusion security is indispensable for video game watermarking as elaborated in [3]. However, the usual method to counter collusion attacks is to apply collusion secure fingerprinting codes, which is known for requiring huge embedding payload [7][8][9].…”

Robust hashing for 3D models

“…For an even number of vertices, the average distance of the two corresponding median vertices is taken, i.e. 1 2 r(v i |b i |/2 ) + r(v i |b i |/2 ) . Note that the vertices have been sorted with respect to their distance to the center point C. Figure 2 illustrates the creation of four bins, i.e.…”