Buyer-seller Watermarking Research Articles

A fair and scalable watermarking scheme for the digital content trading industry

The booming Internet economy and generative artificial intelligence have driven the rapid growth of the digital content trading industry, creating an urgent need for the fair protection of the rights of both buyers and sellers. To meet this need, a technique known as buyer–seller watermarking has emerged. Despite its existence, the majority of existing buyer–seller watermarking schemes adopt the owner-side embedding mode, which results in poor scalability. While a handful of schemes adopt the client-side embedding mode to enhance scalability, they either require the deep involvement of a trusted third party or fall short of ensuring complete fairness due to the unresolved unbinding problem. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a fair and scalable watermarking scheme for digital content transactions based on proxy re-encryption and digital signatures. For one thing, this scheme solves the unbinding problem and ensures complete fair protection of the rights of both buyers and sellers. For another, it adopts the client-side embedding mode and has good scalability. Additionally, it eliminates the need for a trusted third party. Finally, theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves the intended design goals and possesses superior efficiency advantages.

Modified Buyer Seller Watermarking Protocol based on Discrete Wavelet Transform and Principal Component Analysis

This digital watermarking protocol is basically applied to preserve the rights for both parties involving in E-commerce i.e. buyer and seller. Principal component analysis is used to reduce the correlation coefficient. This protocol uses wavelet transform with principal component analysis and integrates digital watermarking techniques and public key cryptosystem for proving the ownership of digital content. In this paper a watermark image that i.e. baby image is inserted into selected high frequency sub-bands of discrete wavelet transformed. Then we have applied the principal component analysis transformation for selecting the blocks. The process for selecting the blocks are depends by calculating the energy of every block and then the maximum energy blocks were selected. We have calculated parameters such as PSNR and NCC for checking the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed approach.

A Verifiable and Secret Buyer–Seller Watermarking Protocol

ABSTRACTA trusted third party (TTP) is introduced to the buyer–seller protocol to guarantee the transaction fairness in protocol. However, the TTP practically increases the cost in the buyer–seller protocol. To address this issue, we propose a novel buyer–seller watermarking protocol to eliminate the need for a TTP. By dividing the buyer's secret key into two primary mechanisms: the buyer's watermark, embedded in digital content, and the transaction number produced by the seller; the seller can verify buyer's watermark without decryption. After inserting a digital watermark from the seller, the buyer cannot remove the watermark from the digital content without a watermark extraction algorithm. The seller cannot fabricate piracy to frame an innocent buyer. When piracy is found, it can be traced clearly because of the privacy homomorphism property. In other words, the proposed protocol can trace piracy and protect the customer's rights without a TTP. Therefore, the conspiracy problem can be solved. The proposed protocol also can protect the anonymity of the buyer and bind the buyer's watermark to digital content. Moreover, the buyer is no longer required to participate in the dispute resolution in our scheme.

Proxy signatures and buyer–seller watermarking protocols for the protection of multimedia content

Watermarking techniques are developed to deal with multimedia distribution, authentication and copyright protection. It is usually the seller who embeds a watermark in multimedia content to identify the buyer. The embedded watermark can then be used to trace the traitors identity if unauthorized copies are found. However, repudiation and framing issues might arise in this approach. To solve these problems, buyer---seller watermarking protocols have been proposed based on watermarking in the encrypted domain. Such watermarks combine encryption, digital watermarking, and fingerprinting to preserve digital rights of both the buyer and the seller. Unfortunately, most existing watermarking techniques do not provide convincing proofs to ensure that they achieve the claimed level of security and informal proofs abound in the literature. In this paper, we propose a buyer---seller watermarking protocol based on proxy signatures and homomorphic encryption. Formal proofs are provided to show that in the proposed protocol, watermarks are generated such that the seller is unable to fabricate piracy, but he can trace copyright violators. The protocol further protects anonymity of the buyer until he is adjudicated to be guilty. Moreover, we solve the conspiracy problem without imposing any unrealistic assumptions about thrust-worthiness of the parties involved.

A Practical BuyerSeller Watermarking Protocol based on Discrete Wavelet Transform

watermarking is the key technology of digital copyright protection. An efficient digital watermarking solution must tackle the problems of copyright protection and trace of pirate copy. Digital water marking is a promising technology to embed information as unperceivable signals in digital contents. It plays a very important role in E-commerce. Buyer-seller watermarking protocols based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) integrate multimedia watermarking and fingerprinting with cryptography, for copyright protection, piracy tracing, and privacy protection. It uses the public key encryption schemes. In this paper we propose a Practical Buyer Seller watermarking protocol based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) which is secure and flexible and gives more security from previous watermarking protocols to both buyer and seller. In this we use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), arbitrator and watermarking certificate authority (WCA) for better security. The protocol has better security property and higher efficiency. Keywordskey infrastructure; copyright protection; Digital watermarking;

A Privacy-Preserving Buyer–Seller Watermarking Protocol Based on Priced Oblivious Transfer

Buyer-seller watermarking protocols allow copyright protection of digital goods. To protect privacy, some of those protocols provide buyers with anonymity. However, anonymous e-commerce protocols pose several disadvantages, like hindering customer management or requiring anonymous payment mechanisms. Additionally, no existing buyer-seller watermarking protocol provides fair exchange. We propose a novel approach for the design of privacy-preserving buyer-seller watermarking protocols. In our approach, the seller authenticates buyers but does not learn which items are purchased. Since buyers are not anonymous, customer management is eased and currently deployed methods of payment can be utilized. We define an ideal functionality for privacy-preserving copyright protection protocols. To realize our functionality, a protocol must ensure that buyers pay the right price without disclosing the purchased item, and that sellers are able to identify buyers that released pirated copies. We construct a protocol based on priced oblivious transfer and on existing techniques for asymmetric watermark embedding. Furthermore, we implement and evaluate the efficiency of our protocol, and we explain how to extend it in order to achieve optimistic fair exchange.

A Provably Secure Anonymous Buyer–Seller Watermarking Protocol

Buyer-seller watermarking (BSW) protocols allow copyright protection of digital content. The protocol is anonymous when the identity of buyers is not revealed if they do not release pirated copies. Existing BSW protocols are not provided with a formal analysis of their security properties. We employ the ideal-world/real-world paradigm to propose a formal security definition for copyright protection protocols, and we analyze an anonymous BSW protocol and prove that it fulfills our definition. Additionally, we implement the protocol and measure its efficiency.

Effective watermarking scheme in the encrypted domain for buyer–seller watermarking protocol

In most watermarking schemes for copyright protection, a seller usually embeds a watermark in multimedia content to identify a buyer. When an unauthorized copy is found by the seller, the traitor’s identity can be traced by the embedded watermark. However, it incurs both repudiation issue and framing issue. To solve these problems, some buyer–seller watermarking protocols have been proposed based on watermarking scheme in the encrypted domain. In this paper, an enhanced watermarking scheme is presented. Compared with Solanki et al.’s scheme, the enhanced scheme increases effective watermarking capacity, avoids additional overhead and overcomes an inherent flaw that watermarking capacity depends on the probability distribution of input watermark sequence. Based on the security requirements of buyer–seller watermarking protocols, a new watermarking scheme in the encrypted domain with flexible watermarking capacity is proposed. It improves the robustness of watermark sequence against image compressions and enables image tampering detection. Watermark extraction is blind, which employs the same threshold criterion and secret keys as watermark embedding. Experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced watermarking scheme eliminates the drawbacks of Solanki et al.’s scheme and that the proposed watermarking scheme in the encrypted domain outperforms Kuribayashi and Tanaka’s scheme.

Analysis of a Buyer–Seller Watermarking Protocol for Trustworthy Purchasing of Digital Contents

In ubiquitous environments where human users get to access diverse kinds of (often multimedia enabled) services irrespective of where they are, the issue of security is a major concern. Security in this setting encompasses both in the interest of the human users as well as their information and objects that they own. A typical kind of transaction interaction among users and/or machines in these environments is that of exchanging digital objects via purchases and/or ownership transfers, e.g. someone buying a song from iTunes via his iPhone, or downloading either bought or rented movies onto a portable DVD player. Here, there is a need to provide trustworthy protection of the rights of both parties; i.e. the seller's copyright needs to be protected against piracy, while on the other hand it has been highlighted in literature the need to protect innocent buyers from being framed. Indeed, if either party cannot be assured that his rights are protected when he is involved in transactions within such environments, he would shy away and instead prefer for instance the more conventional non-digital means of buying and selling. And therefore without active participation from human users and object owners it is difficult to fully kick off the actual realization of intelligent environments. Zhang et al. recently proposed a buyer---seller watermarking protocol without a trusted third party based on secret sharing. While it is a nice idea to eliminate the need of a trusted third party by distributing secret shares between the buyer and the seller such that neither party has knowledge of the fingerprint embedded in a content, we show that it is possible for a buyer to remove his part of the fingerprint from the content he bought. This directly disproves the piracy tracing property claimed by the protocol. In fact, since piracy tracing is one of the earliest security applications of watermarking schemes, it raises doubts as to the soundness of the design of this protocol.

A Buyer–Seller Watermarking Protocol Based on Secure Embedding

In a forensic watermarking architecture, a buyer-seller protocol protects the watermark secrets from the buyer and prevents false infringement accusations by the seller. Existing protocols encrypt the watermark and the content with a homomorphic public-key cipher and perform embedding under encryption. When used for multimedia data, these protocols create a large computation and bandwidth overhead. In this correspondence, we show that the same functionality can be achieved efficiently using recently proposed secure watermark embedding algorithms.

A ROBUST BUYER–SELLER WATERMARKING SCHEME BASED ON DWT

In a buyer–seller watermarking protocol, a seller should embed a buyer's fingerprinting and seller's watermark into the work before the sale of a work to a buyer. If the work is violated, the fingerprinting and watermark can be extracted to correctly identify who holds the legal copyright of the work and trace the illegal reseller. In this paper, we propose a robust buyer–seller watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) which embeds the buyer's fingerprinting and seller's watermark into an image. Besides, during the extraction phase, the extraction of the fingerprinting and watermark does not require the original image for more feasibility in real application. The proposed scheme has the following advantages. Firstly, the extraction of the fingerprinting and watermark does not require the original image. Secondly, the watermarked image maintains a good visual quality after the fingerprinting and watermark embedding. Thirdly, the proposed scheme is robust against several image processing attacks.

Secure buyer–seller watermarking protocol

In the existing watermarking protocols, a trusted third party (TTP) is introduced to guarantee that a protocol is fair to both the seller and buyer in a digital content transaction. However, the TTP decreases the security and affects the protocol implementation. To address this issue, in this article a secure buyer–seller watermarking protocol without the assistance of a TTP is proposed in which there are only two participants, a seller and a buyer. Based on the idea of sharing a secret, a watermark embedded in digital content to trace piracy is composed of two pieces of secret information, one produced by the seller and one by the buyer. Since neither knows the exact watermark, the buyer cannot remove the watermark from watermarked digital content, and at the same time the seller cannot fabricate piracy to frame an innocent buyer. In other words, the proposed protocol can trace piracy and protect the customer's rights. In addition, because no third party is introduced into the proposed protocol, the problem of a seller (or a buyer) colluding with a third party to cheat the buyer (or the seller), namely, the conspiracy problem, can be avoided.