A new approach to countering ambiguity attacks

ABSTRACT

Watermarking based ownership dispute resolution schemes are vulnerable to a simple but effective class of attacks, called ambiguity attacks, which cast doubt on the reliability of resulting decision by exploiting the high false-positive rate of the watermarking scheme. To mitigate such attacks, we propose a new scheme that embeds multiple watermarks, as opposed to embedding a single watermark, while constraining the embedding distortion, and detects a randomly selected subset of them during an ownership proof. The crux of the scheme lies in both watermark generation, which deploys a family of one-way functions, and selective detection, which injects uncertainty to detection process. The reduction in false-positive probability is analyzed and compared to single watermark embedding for the additive watermarking technique through numerical solutions. Moreover, we examine the exact security level that can be achieved by our scheme with different combinations of parameters. We adopt a previous security proof of non-invertible watermarking schemes with modified notion of security that is more realistic in practice, which allows us to derive the achievable security with typical parameters.

REFERENCES

• 1: S. Craver, N. Memon, B. Yeo, M. Yeung: Can invisible watermarks resolve rightful ownerships. In: Technical Report RC 20509, IBM Research Institute (1997).
• 2: M. Ramkumar, A. N. Akansu: Image watermarks and counterfeit attacks: Some problems and solutions. In: Proc. of Content Security and Data Hiding in Digital Media. (1999)
• 3: S. Craver, N. Memon, B. Yeo, M. Yeung: Resolving rightful ownership with invisible watermarking techniques: Limitation, attacks, and implications. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 16(4) (1998) 573--586.
• 4: W. Zeng , B. Liu, On Resolving Rightful Ownership's of Digital Images by Invisible Watermarks, Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP '97) 3-Volume Set-Volume 1, p.552, October 26-29, 1997
• 5: L. Qiao , K. Nahrstedt, Watermarking Methods for MPEG Encoded Video: Towards Resolving Rightful Ownership, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems, p.276, June 28-July 01, 1998 [doi>10.1109/MMCS.1998.693656]
• 6: R. B. Wolfgang, E. Delp: A watermarking technique for digital imagery: Further studies. In: Proc. of SPIE: Voice, Video and Data Communications. (1997) 297--308.
• 7: A. Adelsbach, S. Katzenbeisser, A. Sadegi: On the insecurity of non-invertible watermarking schemes for dispute resolving. In: Proc. of IWDW. (2003).
• 8: M. Ramkumar, A. N. Akansu: A robust protocol for proving ownership of multimedia content. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 6(3) (2004) 469--478.
• 9: S. Katzenbeisser, H. Veith: Securing symmetric watermarking schemes against protocol attacks. In: Proc. of SPIE: Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents. Volume 4675. (2002) 260--268.
• 10: André Adelsbach , Stefan Katzenbeisser , Helmut Veith, Watermarking schemes provably secure against copy and ambiguity attacks, Proceedings of the 3rd ACM workshop on Digital rights management, October 27-27, 2003, Washington, DC, USA [doi>10.1145/947380.947395]
• 11: A. Adelsbach, A. R. Sadeghi: Advanced techniques for dispute resolving and authorship proofs on digital works. In: Proc. of SPIE: Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents V. Volume 5020. (2003).
• 12: Li, Q., Chang, E. C.: On the possibility of non-invertible watermarking schemes. In: Information Hiding Workshop. Volume 3200 of LNCS. (2004) 13--24.
• 13: Husrev T. Sencar , Nasir Memon, Watermarking and ownership problem: a revisit, Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Digital rights management, November 07-07, 2005, Alexandria, VA, USA [doi>10.1145/1102546.1102563]
• 14: I. J. Cox, F. Kilian, F. T. Leighton, T. G. Shamoon: Secure spread spectrum watermarking for multimedia. IEEE Transaction on Image Processing 6(12) (1997) 1673--1687.
• 15: Qiming Li , Ee-Chien Chang, Zero-knowledge watermark detection resistant to ambiguity attacks, Proceedings of the 8th workshop on Multimedia and security, September 26-27, 2006, Geneva, Switzerland [doi>10.1145/1161366.1161395]
• 16: B. Chen, G. W. Wornell: Quantization index modulation: A class of provably good methods for digital watermarking and information embedding. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 47(4)(2001) 1423--1443.
• 17: P. Moulin, R. Koetter: Data hiding codes. Proc. of IEEE 93 (2005) 2083--2126.
• 18: Li, Q., Memon, N.: Practical security of non-invertible watermarking schemes. In: Proc. of IEEE ICIP, San Antonio, Texas (2007) To Appear.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Security

Keywords:
ambiguity attack, security, watermarking