Watermarking Protocol Research Articles

Blockchain and Smart Contracts for Digital Copyright Protection

In a global context characterized by a pressing need to find a solution to the problem of digital copyright protection, buyer-seller watermarking protocols based on asymmetric fingerprinting and adopting a “buyer-friendly” approach have proven effective in addressing such a problem. They can ensure high levels of usability and security. However, they usually resort to trusted third parties (TTPs) to guarantee the protection process, and this is often perceived as a relevant drawback since TTPs may cause conspiracy or collusion problems, besides the fact that they are generally considered as some sort of “big brother”. This paper presents a buyer-seller watermarking protocol that can achieve the right compromise between usability and security without employing a TTP. The protocol is built around previous experiences conducted in the field of protocols based on the buyer-friendly approach. Its peculiarity consists of exploiting smart contracts executed within a blockchain to implement preset and immutable rules that run automatically under specific conditions without control from some kind of central authority. The result is a simple, usable, and secure watermarking protocol able to do without TTPs.

Exploiting number theory for dynamic software watermarking

Software watermarking is a protection technique which aims at combating software piracy, thus defending intellectual property, by embedding stegosignatures or watermarks into a program. In the presence of an illegal copy of the program, the owner can reliably claim her rights by extracting the watermark from the program itself. In this paper, we introduce a new software watermarking technique which can be used even with compiled programs. The proposed technique is dynamic: the watermark can be recovered during the execution of the program and it is related to a specific path of execution that is triggered by a given input. We illustrate the technique by means of a watermarking protocol for C/C++/C# source code which tackles many different challenges in the task of encoding the watermark, embedding it into a source code and extracting it from a compiled program. We show the validity of our approach by proving its robustness against common attacks.

Multiparty watermarking protocol based on blockchain

Multiparty watermarking protocol based on blockchain

Watermarking Protocols: A Short Guide for Beginners

Watermarking protocols, in conjunction with digital watermarking technologies, make it possible to trace back digital copyright infringers by identifying who has legitimately purchased digital content and then illegally shared it on the Internet. Although they can act as an effective deterrent against copyright violations, their adoption in the current web context is made difficult due to unresolved usability and performance issues. This paper aims at providing researchers with the basics needed to design watermarking protocols suited to the web context. It is focused on two important aspects. The first concerns the basic requirements that make a protocol usable by both web users and content providers, whereas the second concerns the security primitives and how they have been used to implement the most relevant examples of watermarking protocols documented in the literature. In this way, researchers can rely on a quick guide to getting started in the field of watermarking protocols.

Vbswp-CeaH: Vigorous Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocol without Trusted Certificate Authority for Copyright Protection in Cloud Environment through Additive Homomorphism

Cloud-based storage ensures the secure dissemination of media. Authentication and integrity are important aspects in the distribution of digital media. Encryption-based techniques shelter this media between the communicating parties which are involved in a transaction. The challenge is how to restrict the digital media which is illegally redistributed by the authorized users. However, the digital watermarking technique and encryption-based methods are also not sufficient enough to provide copyright protection. The watermarking protocol is used to provide intellectual property for the customer and the service provider. This research paper provides a vigorous buyer-seller watermarking protocol without trusted certificate authority for copyright protection in the cloud environment. This research work uses the cloud environment which enables the cloud as a service infrastructural provider for storing credentials such as public and private secret keys and the digital certificates of interacting parties. The scheme uses additive homomorphism encryption with an effective key exchange algorithm for exchanging digital media. This proposed approach addresses the problems of anonymity and copy deterrence and protects the digital rights of the buyer and seller; these most up-to-date issues are related to information security. Furthermore, the experiment results conclude that the proposed protocol is flexible and secure even in a non-secure communication channel. We have used performance measures such as PSNR, NCC and cost in time methods for checking the integrity of the proposed protocol. The conducted experiments show a stronger robustness and high imperceptibility for the watermark and watermarked images.

Interactive screen-shooting resilient ciphertext watermarking protocol between the cloud and the user

The current cloud storage services generally launch the function of browsing files, which brings greatconvenience for users to steal information by shooting files on the screen, and also increases the risk of information leakage. As a result, users taking photos to steal information poses a potential security risk for cloud storage services.The existing method is for the cloud to embed a screen-shooting resilient watermark associated with the user's identityin an image before sending it to the user. Then the cloud can detect the user's watermark from the captured image and discover the user's identity. Both the cloud and the user have the image embedded with the user's watermark, so the leaked images cannot be confirmed to be from the cloud or from the user. To eliminate the ambiguity of the leakage source, ciphertext watermark is utilized, that is, the user's ciphertext watermark is embedded into a plaintext image in the cloud to generate the ciphertext image containing the user's watermark, which can only be decrypted by the user to obtain theplaintext image. Once this image is secretly shot and leaked, it must flow out from the user. However, the current screen-shooting resilient watermarking algorithm does not support the above functions and only supports the embedding of the plaintext watermark. This paper proposes a screen-shooting resilient ciphertext watermarkingprotocol between the cloud and users, which aims to protect the copyright users' ownership of their images and prevent other userswho use the images from stealing images by taking pictures secretly. This paper verifies the security and effectiveness of the proposed protocol through theoretical analysis and simulationexperiments.

A TTP watermarking protocol based on visual cryptography

A TTP watermarking protocol based on visual cryptography

Digital Copyright Protection: Focus on Some Relevant Solutions

Copyright protection of digital content is considered a relevant problem of the current Internet since content digitalization and high performance interconnection networks have greatly increased the possibilities to reproduce and distribute digital content. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems try to prevent the inappropriate or illegal use of copyrighted digital content. They are promoted by the major global media players, but they are also perceived as proprietary solutions that give rise to classic problems of privacy and fair use. On the other hand, watermarking protocols have become a possible solution to the problem of copyright protection. They have evolved during the last decade, and interesting proposals have been designed. This paper first presents current trends concerning the most significant solutions to the problem of copyright protection based on DRM systems and then focuses on the most promising approaches in the field of watermarking protocols. In this regard, the examined protocols are discussed in order to individuate which of them can better represent the right trade-off between opposite goals, such as, for example, security and easy of use, so as to prove that it is possible to implement open solutions compatible with the current web context without resorting to proprietary architectures or impairing the protection of copyrighted digital content.

A cloud-based buyer-seller watermarking protocol (CB-BSWP) using semi-trusted third party for copy deterrence and privacy preserving.

Nowadays, cloud computing provides a platform infrastructure for the secure dealing of digital data, but privacy and copy control are the two important issues in it over a network. Cloud data is available to the end user and requires enormous security and privacy techniques to protect the data. Moreover, the access control mechanism with encryption-based technique protects the digital rights for participants in a transaction, but they do not protect the media from being illegally redistributed and do not restrict an authorized user to reveal their secret information this is referred to as you can access but you cannot leak. This brought out a need for controlling copy deterrence and preserving the privacy of digital media over the internet. To overlook this, we proposed a cloud-based buyer-seller watermarking protocol (CB-BSWP) with the use of a semi-trusted third party for copy deterrence and privacy-preserving in the cloud environment. The suggested scheme uses 1) a privacy homomorphism cryptosystem with Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm to provide an encrypted domain for the secure exchange of digital media 2) adopt robust and fair watermarking techniques to ensure high imperceptibility and robustness for the watermarked images against attacks 3) two services of cloud Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to support virtualized computing infrastructure and Watermarking as a service (WaaS) to execute the speedy process of watermarking, this process is supported by watermarking generation and signing phase (WGSP) and watermark extraction and verifying phase reported in 4th section. 4) cloud service provider (CSP) considered as a “semi-trusted” third party to reduce the burden from the trusted third party (TTP) server and provide storage for the encrypted digital media on cloud databases, this frees content owner from not having a separate storage infrastructure. The proposed scheme encrypts the digital content by using SHA-512 algorithm with key size 512-bits to ensure that it doesn’t affect computational time during the process of encryption. The suggested scheme addresses the problems of piracy tracing, anonymity, tamper resistance, non-framing, customer rights problem. The role of cloud is crucial because it reduces communication overhead, provides unlimited storage, supports the watermarking process and offers a solution for the secure distribution of end-to-end security of digital content over cloud. To check the performance of the suggested CB-BSWP protocol against common image processing attacks, we have conducted experiments in which the perceptual quality of watermarked digital media was found enhanced, resulting in a robust watermark.

Blockchain and Cloud to Overcome the Problems of Buyer and Seller Watermarking Protocols

Copyright protection of digital content has become a problem not only for web content providers but also for ordinary web users who like to publish their digital contents on social or user generated content platforms. Among the possible solutions to such a problem, digital watermarking, in conjunction with watermarking protocols, appears to be a valid alternative to current DRM (digital rights management) systems. In fact, watermarking based solutions insert perceptually invisible copyright information into the copies of contents published or distributed on the web in order to track them. Such insertions are carried out according to the watermarking protocols, which have evolved over the years from the classic “buyer and seller” paradigm into a simpler and versatile “buyer friendly” and “mediated” approach. However, such an approach cannot exploit the new technologies that characterize the current Internet. This paper presents a new watermarking protocol able to adapt the “buyer friendly” and “mediated” approach to the use of innovative technologies such as cloud platforms and blockchain. In this way, (1) content providers and common web users can take advantage of the computing and storage resources made available by cloud platforms; (2) the involvement of trusted third parties in the protocols can be reduced by using blockchain without complicating the protection scheme. In fact, these two goals make the protocol particularly suited for the current Internet.

A Blockchain Based Buyer-seller Watermark Protocol with Trustless Third Party

Background: With the development and innovation of digital information technologies and new-generation Internet information platforms, new types of information exchange methods have been spawned. It has broken the restriction of the traditional internet boundary, and integrated all round connections between people and objects. Methods: Based on the above progresses, digital multimedia contents distributed or published much more convenient on the internet than before and most of them without any copyright protection. The dishonest owner can easily copy and distribute digital multimedia content without reducing any perceptual quality. According to the relative concerns, watermark protocol networks play a very important role in the usage tracking and copyrights infringement authentication, etc. However, most of the watermark protocols always require a “fully trusted third party”, which has a potential risk to suffer conspiracy attack. Results: Therefore, in this paper, we focus on designing a watermark protocol with trustless third party via blockchain for protecting copyrights of owners that they want to publish or distribute on the internet. The proposed watermark protocol includes three sub-protocols which covers the negotiation process, transaction process and identification processes. Conclusion: In addition, this paper also provides a fully detail analysis that describes the benefits and weaknesses of current solution.

A Watermarking Protocol Based on Blockchain

Digital watermarking can be used to implement mechanisms aimed at protecting the copyright of digital content distributed on the Internet. Such mechanisms support copyright identification and content tracking by enabling content providers to embed perceptually invisible watermarks into the distributed copies of content. They are employed in conjunction with watermarking protocols, which define the schemes of the web transactions by which buyers can securely purchase protected digital content distributed by content providers. In this regard, the “buyer friendly” and “mediated” watermarking protocols can ensure both a correct content protection and an easy participation of buyers in the transactions by which to purchase the distributed content. They represent a valid alternative to the classic “buyer and seller” watermarking protocols documented in the literature. However, their protection schemes could be further improved and simplified. This paper presents a new watermarking protocol able to combine the “buyer friendly” and “mediated” design approach with the blockchain technology. The result is a secure protocol that can support a limited and balanced participation of both buyers and content providers in the purchase transactions of protected digital content. Moreover, the protocol can avoid the direct involvement of trusted third parties in the purchase transactions. This can reduce the actual risk that buyers or sellers can violate the protocol by illicitly interacting with trusted third parties. In fact, such peculiarities make the proposed protocol suited for the current web context.

Secure neural network watermarking protocol against forging attack

In order to protect the intellectual property of neural network, an owner may select a set of trigger samples and their corresponding labels to train a network, and prove the ownership by the trigger set without revealing the inner mechanism and parameters of the network. However, if an attacker is allowed to access the neural network, he can forge a matching relationship between fake trigger samples and fake labels to confuse the ownership. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network watermarking protocol against the forging attack. By introducing one-way hash function, the trigger samples used to prove ownership must form a one-way chain, and their labels are also assigned. By this way, an attacker without the right of network training is impossible to construct a chain of trigger samples or the matching relationship between the trigger samples and the assigned labels. Our experiments show that the proposed protocol can resist the watermark forgery without sacrificing the network performance.

A multiparty watermarking protocol for cloud environments

The advances in multimedia and networking technologies together with the wide spread of social networks and user generated content platforms have turned ordinary web users into actual multimedia content generators. This has given rise to the copyright protection problem of multimedia contents published or distributed on the Internet. In fact, dishonest web users or administrators of networks and platforms can easily duplicate the digital images and videos they host without reducing their perceptual quality. Then, such contents can be maliciously modified and/or re-distributed, thus damaging the reputation of their legitimate owners, or revealing their private information, or causing economic loss. A possible solution to such a problem consists in protecting digital content by adopting mechanisms of copyright identification and content tracking by fingerprinting based on digital watermarking technologies used in conjunction with watermarking protocols. However, most of the watermarking protocols documented in the literature have been designed as two-party protocols between classic buyers and sellers. On the contrary, the complexity of the distribution models of digital contents on the Internet needs new watermarking protocols based on multi-party approaches, which should make it possible to securely involve actors different from buyers and sellers, such as, for example, cloud computing operators. The paper presents a multi-party watermarking protocol that enables content owners to exploit cloud computing environments to protect the digital contents that they want to publish or distribute on the Internet. Such a result is achieved by enabling the different actors involved in the online transactions needed to support web content protection and distribution to securely interact according to a protocol that can mediate among conflicting interests.

A Cloud-User Watermarking Protocol Protecting the Right to Be Forgotten for the Outsourced Plain Images

This article describes how cloud storage dramatically benefits people in freeing up their local storage space, while bringing the separation of the data ownership and private manipulation. Hence, it is difficult for the cloud user to make sure that the cloud storage provider (CSP) has obeyed the request of deletion to remove all corresponding data. To solve the issue technically, this article proposes an interactive cloud-user watermarking protocol (CUW) based on the homomorphic encryption. To meet security requirements, the encrypted watermark is embedded into encrypted data. Moreover, to enjoy the convenient cloud services, the uploaded data is eventually stored in the cloud server in the form of plain text. The performance of the CUW protocol is evaluated through a prototype implementation.

A lightweight buyer-seller watermarking protocol based on time-stamping and composite signal representation

The protocol allows a content provider to detect duplicate copy of a digital content and restrict the content provider who blames the innocent customer. This paper, proposed a lightweight protocol, which uses composite signal representation and time-stamping for watermark embedding and extraction. We have used timestamp, which tells at what time the digital content was created, signed or verified to digital watermarking algorithms and uses the composite signal representation for minimizing the overhead and bandwidth due to the use of composite signals. The suggested protocol uses composite signal representations and timestamp based methods with digital watermarking scheme for content authentication. Our watermark embedding and detection algorithm achieves a balance between robustness and image visual quality. Simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm used by proposed protocol has an increase robustness and good quality of watermark images as well and withstand against various image-processing attacks.

Multiparty Multilevel Watermarking Protocol for Digital Secondary Market Based on Iris Recognition Technology

Background: In order to design secure digital right management architecture between different producers and different consumers, this paper proposes a multiparty and multilevel watermarking protocol for primary and secondary market. Comparing with the traditional buyer-seller watermarking protocols, this paper makes several outstanding achievements. Keywords: Second-hand market, iris recognition technology, watermarking protocol, multilevel, multiparty, sub-protocol, digital right management.

Watermarking protocols: an excursus to motivate a new approach

Digital watermarking is one of the techniques that can be used to support digital copyright protection. It enables copyright owners to insert a perceptually invisible watermark within any copy of content that is distributed on the Internet. The main aim is to use watermarks to implement copyright identification and content tracking. However, digital watermarking is not sufficient to ensure an adequate copyright protection, if it is not employed in conjunction with watermarking protocols, which define the schemes of the web transactions by which buyers can purchase protected digital content distributed by content providers in a secure manner. Therefore, watermarking protocols play a central role in the field of digital copyright protection by means of watermarking techniques. They have to ensure both a correct content protection and an easy participation of buyers in the purchase transactions of the contents distributed on the Internet. This paper presents a new watermarking protocol based on an innovative, buyer centric, and mediated design approach. The result is a secure protocol that enables buyers to easily participate in the transactions by which they can buy digital protected content, and this makes the protocol suited for the current web context.

A Digital Rights Management System based on Cloud

In the current Internet, digital entertainment contents, such as video or audio files, are easily accessible due to the new multimedia technologies and to broadband network connections. This causes considerable economic loss to global media players since digital contents, once legitimately obtained, can be illegitimately shared through file sharing services on the Internet. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems have been proposed to support the protection of copyrighted digital contents. Even though such systems have been widely adopted and promoted by global media players, they are based on proprietary mechanisms that usually work only in closed, monolithic environments. In this regard, systems based on watermarking technologies appear more suited to protect digital copyrighted content. This paper describes the implementation scheme of a DRM system able to ensure the copyright protection of digital content according to an innovative buyer-friendly watermarking protocol. The DRM system has been implemented by exploiting a cloud environment in order to improve the overall performance of the system. In particular, cloud behaves as a service infrastructural provider, since the content provider involved in the watermarking protocol uses cloud to speed up the watermark embedding process and to save storage and bandwidth costs needed to store and to deliver protected contents.

A buyer-seller watermarking protocol for digital secondary market

In the digital right management value chain, digital watermarking technology plays a very important role in digital product’s security, especially on its usage tracking and copyrights infringement authentication. However, watermark procedures can only effectively support copyright protection processes if they are applied as part of an appropriate watermark protocol. In this regard, a number of watermark protocols have been proposed in the literature and have been shown to facilitate the use of digital watermarking technology as copyright protection. One example of such protocols is the anonymous buyer-seller watermarking protocol. Although there are a number of protocols that have been proposed in the literature and provide suitable solutions, they are mainly designed as a watermarking protocol for the first-hand market and are unsuitable for second-hand transactions. As the complexity of online transaction increases, so does the size of the digital second-hand market. In this paper, we present a new buyer-seller watermark protocol that addresses the needs of customer’s rights problem in the digital secondary market. The proposed protocol consists of five sub-protocols that cover the registration process, watermarking process for the first, second and third-hand transactions as well as the identification & arbitration processes. This paper provides analysis that compares the proposed protocols with existing state-of-the-arts and shows that it has met not only all the buyer’s and seller’s requirements in the traditional sense but also accommodates the same requirements in the secondary market.