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does not destroy the value of the Work, while it is dicult for a malicious
adversary (“Mallory”) to remove or alter the mark beyond detection without
doing so. The ability to resist attacks from such an adversary, mostly aimed
at removing the watermark, is one of the major concerns in the design of a
sound solution.
Marked Work
Stego Work
Key
Watermark
Key
Watermark
Watermark
Extraction
Watermarking
Original
Stego Work
Marked Work
Yes/No
(confidence level)
Fig. 1.
Introduction: (a)
Digital Watermarking
conceals an indelible “rights witness”
(“rights signature”, watermark) within the digital Work to be protected. (b) In
court, a detection process is deployed to prove the existence of this “witness” beyond
reasonable doubt (confidence level) and thus assess ownership.
There exists a multitude of semantic frameworks for discrete information
processing and distribution. Each distinct data domain would benefit from
the availability of a suitable watermarking solution.
Significant research efforts [2] [3] [8] [11] [14] [15] [22] [24] have been in-
vested in the frameworks of signal processing and multimedia Works (e.g.,
images, video and audio).
Here we explore Information Hiding as a rights assessment tool for
dis-
crete
data types i.e., in a relational database context. We explore existing
watermarking solutions for numeric and categorical data types.
The Chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2 we explore the broader
issues and challenges pertaining to steganography for rights protection. Then,
in Sections 3 and 4 solutions for numeric respectively categorical data types are
introduced. Related work is discussed in Section 5. Section 6 briefly discusses
the current state of the art and Section 7 concludes.
2Model
Before we proceed however, let us first understand how the ability to prove
rights in court relates to the final desiderata, namely to
protect
those rights.
After all, doesn't simply publishing a summary or digest of the Work to be
protected - e.g., in a newspaper, just before releasing the Work - do the job?
