Resolving rightful ownerships with invisible watermarking techniques: limitations, attacks, and implications

Abstract

Digital watermarks have been proposed in recent literature as a means for copyright protection of multimedia data. In this paper we address the capability of invisible watermarking schemes to resolve copyright ownership. We show that, in certain applications, rightful ownership cannot be resolved by current watermarking schemes alone. Specifically, we attack existing techniques by providing counterfeit watermarking schemes that can be performed on a watermarked image to allow multiple claims of rightful ownership. In the absence of standardization and specific requirements imposed on watermarking procedures, anyone can claim ownership of any watermarked image. In order to protect against the counterfeiting techniques that we develop, we examine the properties necessary for resolving ownership via invisible watermarking. We introduce and study invertibility and quasi-invertibility of invisible watermarking techniques. We propose noninvertible watermarking schemes, and subsequently give examples of techniques that we believe to be nonquasi-invertible and hence invulnerable against more sophisticated attacks proposed in the paper. The attacks and results presented in the paper, and the remedies proposed, further imply that we have to carefully reevaluate the current approaches and techniques in invisible watermarking of digital images based on application domains, and rethink the promises, applications and implications of such digital means of copyright protection. Index Terms-Attacks on digital watermarks, copyright protection, counterfeit watermarks, cryptography, invertible and noninvertible watermarking, invisible watermarks, quasi-invertible watermarking. I. INTRODUCTION T HE rapid growth of digital imagery coupled with the ease by which digital information can be duplicated and distributed has led to the need for effective copyright protection tools. Various watermarking schemes and software products have been recently introduced in attempt to address this growing concern. Given the flurry of activity that has resulted, it is natural to ask a few questions regarding all these efforts:

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“…It allows to firmly bound content with metadata such as the copyright holder identity (copyright protection [2]) or the copy status (copy protection [3]). At that time, the naïve rationale was: "If you can't see it, and if it is not removed by common processing, then it must be secure".…”

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