Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Database Watermarking for Copyright
Protection
Radu Sion
Network Security and Applied Cryptography Lab
Computer Science, Stony Brook University
sion@cs.stonybrook.edu
Summary.
As increasing amounts of data are produced, packaged and delivered in
digital form, in a fast, networked environment, one of its main features threatens to
become its worst enemy: zero-cost verbatim copies. The ability to produce duplicates
of digital Works at almost no cost can now be misused for illicit profit. This mandates
mechanisms for effective rights assessment and protection.
One such mechanism is based on
Information Hiding
. By concealing a resilient
rights holder identity “signature” (
watermark
) within the digital Work(s) to be pro-
tected, Information Hiding for Rights Assessment (
Watermarking
) enables ulterior
court-time proofs associating particular Works with their respective rights holders.
One main challenge is the fact that altering the Work in the process of hid-
ing information could possibly destroy its value. At the same time one has to be
concerned with a malicious adversary, with major incentives to remove or alter the
watermark beyond detection - thus disabling the ability for court-time proofs -
without destroying the value of the Work - to preserve its potential for illicit profit.
In this chapter we explore how Information Hiding can be deployed as an effective
tool for Rights Assessment for discrete digital data. More specifically, we discuss
numeric and categorical relational data.
1 Introduction
Mechanisms for privacy assurances (e.g., queries over encrypted data) are
essential to a viable and
secure
management solution for outsourced data.
On a somewhat orthogonal dimension but equally important, we find the
requirement to be able to
assert and protect rights
over such data.
Different avenues are available, each with its advantages and drawbacks.
Enforcement by legal means is usually ineffective, unless augmented by a
digital counterpart such as Information Hiding.
Digital Watermarking
as a
method of Rights Assessment deploys Information Hiding to conceal an in-
delible “rights witness” (“rights signature”, watermark) within the digital
Work to be protected (see Figure 1). The soundness of such a method relies
on the assumption that altering the Work in the process of hiding the mark
