Exploiting self-similarities to defeat digital watermarking systems: a case study on still images

ABSTRACT

Unauthorized digital copying is a major concern for multi-media content providers. Since copyright owners lose control over content distribution as soon as data is decrypted or unscrambled, digital watermarking has been introduced as a complementary protection technology. In an effort to anticipate hostile behaviors of adversaries, the research community is constantly introducing novel attacks to benchmark watermarking systems. In this paper, a generic block replacement attack will be presented. The underlying assumption is that multimedia content is highly repetitive. It should consequently be possible to exploit the self-similarities of the signal to replace each signal block with another perceptually similar one. Alternative methods to compute such a valid placement block will be surveyed in this paper. Then,experimental results on still images will be presented to the efficiency of the presented attack in comparison with other reference image processing operations. Finally, a will be conducted to exhibit the properties that a watermark should have to resist to this attack.

REFERENCES

• 1: Simon Byers , Lorrie Cranor , Dave Korman , Patrick McDaniel , Eric Cronin, Analysis of security vulnerabilities in the movie production and distribution process, Proceedings of the 3rd ACM workshop on Digital rights management, October 27-27, 2003, Washington, DC, USA [doi>10.1145/947380.947383]
• 2: Certimark. http://www.certimark.org.
• 3: Checkmark. http://watermarking.unige.ch/checkmark.
• 4: Henri Cohen, A course in computational algebraic number theory, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., New York, NY, 1995
• 5: I. Cox and M. Miller. Preprocessing media to facilitate later insertion of a watermark. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Signal Processing volume 1, pages 67--70, July 2002.
• 6: Ingemar Cox , Matthew L. Miller , Jeffery A. Bloom, Digital watermarking, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 2001
• 7: G. Doërr and J.-L. Dugelay. New intra-video collusion attack using mosaicing. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo volume II, pages 505--508, July 2003.
• 8: G. Doërr and J.-L. Dugelay. Secure background watermarking based on video mosaicing. In Security, Steganography and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents VI volume 5306 of Proceedings of SPIE January 2004.
• 9: G. Doërr and J.-L. Dugelay. Security pitfalls of frame-by-frame approaches to video watermarking. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Supplement on Secure Media October 2004.
• 10: DVD Copy Control Association.http://www.dvdcca.org.
• 11: Yuval Fisher, Fractal image compression: theory and application, Springer-Verlag, London, 1995
• 12: M. Gharavi-Alkhansari and T. Huang. A fractal-based image block-coding algorithm. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing volume V, pages 345--348, April 1993.
• 13: F. Hartung, J. Su, and B. Girod. Spread spectrum watermarking: Malicious attacks and counterattacks. In Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents volume 3657 of Proceedings of SPIE pages 147--158, January 1999.
• 14: A. Herrigel, S. Voloshynovskiy, and Y. Rytsar. The watermark template attack. In Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents III volume 4314 of Proceedings of SPIE pages 394--405, January 2001.
• 15: M. Holliman, W. Macy, and M. Yeung. Robust frame-dependent video watermarking. In Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents II volume 3971 of Proceedings of SPIE pages 186--197, January 2000.
• 16: A. Jacquin. A novel fractal block-coding technique for digital images. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing volumeIV, pages 2225--2228, April 1990.
• 17: I. Jolliffe. Principal Component Analysis Springer-Verlag, 1986.
• 18: JPEG Standard. Digital compression and coding of continuous-tone still images. In JTC1/SC29/WG1 10918-1 ISO/IEC, February 1994.
• 19: Darko Kirovski , Henrique S. Malvar, Robust Covert Communication over a Public Audio Channel Using Spread Spectrum, Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Information Hiding, p.354-368, April 25-27, 2001
• 20: D. Kirovski and F. Petitcolas. Blind pattern matching attack on watermarking systems. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing 51(4):1045--1053, April 2003.
• 21: D. Kirovski and F. Petitcolas. Replacement attack on arbitrary watermarking systems. In Proceedings of the ACM Digital Rights Management Workshop volume 2696 of Lecture Notes on Computer Science pages 177--189, July 2003.
• 22: M. Kutter. Watermarking resisting to translation, rotation and scaling. In Multimedia Systems and Applications volume 3528 of Proceedings of SPIE pages 423--431, November 1998.
• 23: M. Kutter and F. Petitcolas. A fair benchmark for image watermarking systems. In Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents volume 3657 of Proceedings of SPIE pages 226--239, January 1999.
• 24: G. Langelaar, R. Lagendijk, and J. Biemond. Removing spatial spread spectrum watermarks by nonlinear filtering. In Proceedings of the European Signal Processing Conference volume IV, pages 2281--2284, September 1998.
• 25: G. Øien,S. Lepsøy, and T. Ramstad. An inner product space approach to image coding by contractive transformations. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing volume III, pages 2773--2776, May 1991.
• 26: OpenWatermark. http://www.openwatermark.org.
• 27: Optimark. http://poseidon.csd.auth.gr/optimark.
• 28: Joseph J.K. ÓRuanaidh , Thierry Pun, Rotation, scale and translation invariant spread spectrum digital image watermarking, Signal Processing, v.66 n.3, p.303-317, May 1998 [doi>10.1016/S0165-1684(98)00012-7]
• 29: Fabien A. P. Petitcolas , Ross J. Anderson , Markus G. Kuhn, Attacks on Copyright Marking Systems, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Information Hiding, p.218-238, April 14-17, 1998
• 30: F. Petitcolas and D. Kirovski. The blind pattern matching attack on watermarking systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing volume IV, pages 3740--3743, May 2002.
• 31: C. Rey. Tatouage d'Images: Gain en Robustesse et Intégrité des Images PhD thesis, Université d 'Avignon, France, February 2003.
• 32: C. Rey,G. Doërr, J.-L. Dugelay, and G. Csurka. Toward generic image dewatermarking? In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing volume III, pages 633--636, September 2002.
• 33: P. Sallee. Model-based steganography. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Digital Watermarking volume 2939 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science pages 154--167, October 2003.
• 34: Secure Digital Music Initiative. http://www.sdmi.org.
• 35: Stirmark. http://www.petitcolas.net/fabien/watermarking/stirmark.
• 36: J. Su and B. Girod. Power-spectrum condition for energy-efficient watermarking. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 4(4):551--560, December 2002.
• 37: S. Voloshynovskiy, S. Pereira, A. Herrigel, N. Baumgärtner, and T. Pun. Generalized watermarking attack based on watermark estimation and perceptual remodulation. In Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents II volume 3971 of Proceedings of SPIE pages 358--370, January 2000.
• 38: S. Voloshynovskiy , S. Pereira , V. Iquise , T. Pun, Attack modelling: towards a second generation watermarking benchmark, Signal Processing, v.81 n.6, p.1177-1214, June 2001 [doi>10.1016/S0165-1684(01)00039-1]
• 39: Watermark Evaluation Testbed (WET). Contact Professor E. Delp, Purdue University, USA.
• 40: M. Wu and B. Liu. Attacks on digital watermarks. In Proceedings of 33th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers volume II, pages 1508--1512, October 1999.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.1 Public Policy Issues
          Subjects: Intellectual property rights

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.4 IMAGE PROCESSING AND COMPUTER VISION
      I.4.9 Applications

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.2 Installation Management
          Subjects: Benchmarks

General Terms:
Reliability, Security

Keywords:
block replacement attack, intra-signal collusion, self-similarities