On the Properties of Non-Media Digital Watermarking: A Review of State of the Art Techniques
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paper_title: Data Mining: The Textbook

paper_content:

This textbook explores the different aspects of data mining from the fundamentals to the complex data types and their applications, capturing the wide diversity of problem domains for data mining issues. It goes beyond the traditional focus on data mining problems to introduce advanced data types such as text, time series, discrete sequences, spatial data, graph data, and social networks. Until now, no single book has addressed all these topics in a comprehensive and integrated way. The chapters of this book fall into one of three categories: Fundamental chapters: Data mining has four main problems, which correspond to clustering, classification, association pattern mining, and outlier analysis. These chapters comprehensively discuss a wide variety of methods for these problems. Domain chapters: These chapters discuss the specific methods used for different domains of data such as text data, time-series data, sequence data, graph data, and spatial data. Application chapters: These chapters study important applications such as stream mining, Web mining, ranking, recommendations, social networks, and privacy preservation. The domain chapters also have an applied flavor. Appropriate for both introductory and advanced data mining courses, Data Mining: The Textbook balances mathematical details and intuition. It contains the necessary mathematical details for professors and researchers, but it is presented in a simple and intuitive style to improve accessibility for students and industrial practitioners (including those with a limited mathematical background). Numerous illustrations, examples, and exercises are included, with an emphasis on semantically interpretable examples. Praise for Data Mining: The Textbook - As I read through this book, I have already decided to use it in my classes. This is a book written by an outstanding researcher who has made fundamental contributions to data mining, in a way that is both accessible and up to date. The book is complete with theory and practical use cases. Its a must-have for students and professors alike!" -- Qiang Yang, Chair of Computer Science and Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology"This is the most amazing and comprehensive text book on data mining. It covers not only the fundamental problems, such as clustering, classification, outliers and frequent patterns, and different data types, including text, time series, sequences, spatial data and graphs, but also various applications, such as recommenders, Web, social network and privacy. It is a great book for graduate students and researchers as well as practitioners." -- Philip S. Yu, UIC Distinguished Professor and Wexler Chair in Information Technology at University of Illinois at Chicago
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paper_title: Rights protection for relational data

paper_content:

Protecting rights over relational data is of ever increasing interest, especially considering areas where sensitive, valuable content is to be outsourced. A good example is a data mining application, where data is sold in pieces to parties specialized in mining it.Different avenues for rights protection are available, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. Enforcement by legal means is usually ineffective in preventing theft of copyrighted works, unless augmented by a digital counter-part, for example watermarking.Recent research of the authors introduces the issue of digital watermarking for generic number sets. In the present paper we expand on this foundation and introduce a solution for relational database content rights protection through watermarking.Our solution addresses important attacks, such as data re-sorting, subset selection, linear data changes (applying a linear transformation on arbitrary subsets of the data). Our watermark also survives up to 50% and above data loss.Finally we present wmdb.*, a proof-of-concept implementation of our algorithm and its application to real life data, namely in watermarking the outsourced Wal-Mart sales data that we have available at our institute.
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paper_title: Secure Provenance Transmission for Streaming Data

paper_content:

Many application domains, such as real-time financial analysis, e-healthcare systems, sensor networks, are characterized by continuous data streaming from multiple sources and through intermediate processing by multiple aggregators. Keeping track of data provenance in such highly dynamic context is an important requirement, since data provenance is a key factor in assessing data trustworthiness which is crucial for many applications. Provenance management for streaming data requires addressing several challenges, including the assurance of high processing throughput, low bandwidth consumption, storage efficiency and secure transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to securely transmit provenance for streaming data (focusing on sensor network) by embedding provenance into the interpacket timing domain while addressing the above mentioned issues. As provenance is hidden in another host-medium, our solution can be conceptualized as watermarking technique. However, unlike traditional watermarking approaches, we embed provenance over the interpacket delays (IPDs) rather than in the sensor data themselves, hence avoiding the problem of data degradation due to watermarking. Provenance is extracted by the data receiver utilizing an optimal threshold-based mechanism which minimizes the probability of provenance decoding errors. The resiliency of the scheme against outside and inside attackers is established through an extensive security analysis. Experiments show that our technique can recover provenance up to a certain level against perturbations to inter-packet timing characteristics.
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paper_title: Digital Watermarking

paper_content:

Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.
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paper_title: Self-identifying sensor data

paper_content:

Public-use sensor datasets are a useful scientific resource with the unfortunate feature that their provenance is easily disconnected from their content. To address this we introduce a technique to directly associate provenance information with sensor datasets. Our technique is similar to traditional watermarking but is intended for application to unstructured datasets. Our approach is potentially imperceptible given sufficient margins of error in datasets, and is robust to a number of benign but likely transformations including truncation, rounding, bit-flipping, sampling, and reordering. We provide algorithms for both one-bit and blind mark checking. Our algorithms are probabilistic in nature and are characterized by a combinatorial analysis.
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paper_title: Digital Watermarking

paper_content:

Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.
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paper_title: Steganography in Digital Media: Principles, Algorithms, and Applications

paper_content:

Steganography, the art of hiding of information in apparently innocuous objects or images, is a field with a rich heritage, and an area of rapid current development. This clear, self-contained guide shows you how to understand the building blocks of covert communication in digital media files and how to apply the techniques in practice, including those of steganalysis, the detection of steganography. Assuming only a basic knowledge in calculus and statistics, the book blends the various strands of steganography, including information theory, coding, signal estimation and detection, and statistical signal processing. Experiments on real media files demonstrate the performance of the techniques in real life, and most techniques are supplied with pseudo-code, making it easy to implement the algorithms. The book is ideal for students taking courses on steganography and information hiding, and is also a useful reference for engineers and practitioners working in media security and information assurance.
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paper_title: Disappearing Cryptography: Information Hiding: Steganography and Watermarking

paper_content:

Cryptology is the practice of hiding digital information by means of various obfuscatory and steganographic techniques. The application of said techniques facilitates message confidentiality and sender/receiver identity authentication, and helps to ensure the integrity and security of computer passwords, ATM card information, digital signatures, DVD and HDDVD content, and electronic commerce. Cryptography is also central to digital rights management (DRM), a group of techniques for technologically controlling the use of copyrighted material that is being widely implemented and deployed at the behest of corporations that own and create revenue from the hundreds of thousands of mini-transactions that take place daily on programs like iTunes. ::: ::: This new edition of our best-selling book on cryptography and information hiding delineates a number of different methods to hide information in all types of digital media files. These methods include encryption, compression, data embedding and watermarking, data mimicry, and scrambling. During the last 5 years, the continued advancement and exponential increase of computer processing power have enhanced the efficacy and scope of electronic espionage and content appropriation. Therefore, this edition has amended and expanded outdated sections in accordance with new dangers, and includes 5 completely new chapters that introduce newer more sophisticated and refined cryptographic algorithms and techniques (such as fingerprinting, synchronization, and quantization) capable of withstanding the evolved forms of attack. ::: ::: Each chapter is divided into sections, first providing an introduction and high-level summary for those who wish to understand the concepts without wading through technical explanations, and then presenting concrete examples and greater detail for those who want to write their own programs. This combination of practicality and theory allows programmers and system designers to not only implement tried and true encryption procedures, but also consider probable future developments in their designs, thus fulfilling the need for preemptive caution that is becoming ever more explicit as the transference of digital media escalates. ::: ::: ::: * Includes 5 completely new chapters that delineate the most current and sophisticated cryptographic algorithms, allowing readers to protect their information against even the most evolved electronic attacks. ::: ::: * Conceptual tutelage in conjunction with detailed mathematical directives allows the reader to not only understand encryption procedures, but also to write programs which anticipate future security developments in their design. ::: ::: * Grants the reader access to online source code which can be used to directly implement proven cryptographic procedures such as data mimicry and reversible grammar generation into their own work.
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paper_title: Self-identifying sensor data

paper_content:

Public-use sensor datasets are a useful scientific resource with the unfortunate feature that their provenance is easily disconnected from their content. To address this we introduce a technique to directly associate provenance information with sensor datasets. Our technique is similar to traditional watermarking but is intended for application to unstructured datasets. Our approach is potentially imperceptible given sufficient margins of error in datasets, and is robust to a number of benign but likely transformations including truncation, rounding, bit-flipping, sampling, and reordering. We provide algorithms for both one-bit and blind mark checking. Our algorithms are probabilistic in nature and are characterized by a combinatorial analysis.
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paper_title: Moving steganography and steganalysis from the laboratory into the real world

paper_content:

There has been an explosion of academic literature on steganography and steganalysis in the past two decades. With a few exceptions, such papers address abstractions of the hiding and detection problems, which arguably have become disconnected from the real world. Most published results, including by the authors of this paper, apply "in laboratory conditions" and some are heavily hedged by assumptions and caveats; significant challenges remain unsolved in order to implement good steganography and steganalysis in practice. This position paper sets out some of the important questions which have been left unanswered, as well as highlighting some that have already been addressed successfully, for steganography and steganalysis to be used in the real world.
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paper_title: The First 50 Years of Electronic Watermarking

paper_content:

Electronic watermarking can be traced back as far as 1954. The last 10 years has seen considerable interest in digital watermarking, due, in large part, to concerns about illegal piracy of copyrighted content. In this paper, we consider the following questions: is the interest warranted? What are the commercial applications of the technology? What scientific progress has been made in the last 10 years? What are the most exciting areas for research? And where might the next 10 years take us? In our opinion, the interest in watermarking is appropriate. However, we expect that copyright applications will be overshadowed by applications such as broadcast monitoring, authentication, and tracking content distributed within corporations. We further see a variety of applications emerging that add value to media, such as annotation and linking content to the Web. These latter applications may turn out to be the most compelling. Considerable progress has been made toward enabling these applications--perceptual modelling, security threats and countermeasures, and the development of a bag of tricks for efficient implementations. Further progress is needed in methods for handling geometric and temporal distortions. We expect other exciting developments to arise from research in informed watermarking.
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paper_title: Data Mining Concepts and Techniques

paper_content:

Understand the need for analyses of large, complex, information-rich data sets. Identify the goals and primary tasks of the data-mining process. Describe the roots of data-mining technology. Recognize the iterative character of a data-mining process and specify its basic steps. Explain the influence of data quality on a data-mining process. Establish the relation between data warehousing and data mining. Data mining is an iterative process within which progress is defined by discovery, through either automatic or manual methods. Data mining is most useful in an exploratory analysis scenario in which there are no predetermined notions about what will constitute an "interesting" outcome. Data mining is the search for new, valuable, and nontrivial information in large volumes of data. It is a cooperative effort of humans and computers. Best results are achieved by balancing the knowledge of human experts in describing problems and goals with the search capabilities of computers. In practice, the two primary goals of data mining tend to be prediction and description. Prediction involves using some variables or fields in the data set to predict unknown or future values of other variables of interest. Description, on the other hand, focuses on finding patterns describing the data that can be interpreted by humans. Therefore, it is possible to put data-mining activities into one of two categories: Predictive data mining, which produces the model of the system described by the given data set, or Descriptive data mining, which produces new, nontrivial information based on the available data set.
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paper_title: A lightweight high capacity ECG watermark with protection against data loss

paper_content:

Wireless Body Sensor Networks are used for pervasive health monitoring and often composed of a large number of sensors communicating over wireless connections. The wireless nature of WBSN poses challenges in terms of security and reliability since sensory data are vulnerable to interception, intrusion and modifications. Moreover, there are ergonomic limitations such as size and weight on wearable sensors that restrict their computational power. In this paper, we propose a variation of the Wong algorithm used in digital watermarking that is suitable for implementation on simple devices with limited processing capabilities and protects data from tampering between point of origin, which could be a wearable sensor, and the point of distribution which might be a Smartphone. At the same time, the watermark has the advantage to detect and accurately localize degraded data and could rapidly recover after data loss.
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paper_title: Watermarking of digital geospatial datasets: a review of technical, legal and copyright issues

paper_content:

Gathering data accounts for more than 80% of the cost of any GIS project. Fast Internet connections and digital datasets threaten the investments of data producers through data piracy. Outside the GIS community this problem has been known for a long time, and possible solutions exist for digital imagery, formatted text, 3D meshes and so on, showing possible links to typical spatial data. This is largely achieved through embedding hidden information in a dataset without producing perceptible changes in the data, a process known as watermarking. The producer can recover the embedded information on request in order to produce evidence of ownership in a court, so the overall strategy relies on a legal basis rather than technical ones. This paper analyses the state-of-the-art for watermarking protection in digital geographical datasets. Digital imagery is demonstrably a more mature area than geographical information, even with multiple commercial vendors offering watermarking protection. 2D vector and point da...
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paper_title: Secure Provenance Transmission for Streaming Data

paper_content:

Many application domains, such as real-time financial analysis, e-healthcare systems, sensor networks, are characterized by continuous data streaming from multiple sources and through intermediate processing by multiple aggregators. Keeping track of data provenance in such highly dynamic context is an important requirement, since data provenance is a key factor in assessing data trustworthiness which is crucial for many applications. Provenance management for streaming data requires addressing several challenges, including the assurance of high processing throughput, low bandwidth consumption, storage efficiency and secure transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to securely transmit provenance for streaming data (focusing on sensor network) by embedding provenance into the interpacket timing domain while addressing the above mentioned issues. As provenance is hidden in another host-medium, our solution can be conceptualized as watermarking technique. However, unlike traditional watermarking approaches, we embed provenance over the interpacket delays (IPDs) rather than in the sensor data themselves, hence avoiding the problem of data degradation due to watermarking. Provenance is extracted by the data receiver utilizing an optimal threshold-based mechanism which minimizes the probability of provenance decoding errors. The resiliency of the scheme against outside and inside attackers is established through an extensive security analysis. Experiments show that our technique can recover provenance up to a certain level against perturbations to inter-packet timing characteristics.
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paper_title: A schema for protecting the integrity of databases

paper_content:

Unauthorized changes to databases can result in significant losses for organizations as well as individuals. Watermarking can be used to protect the integrity of databases against unauthorized alterations. Prior work focused on watermarking database tables or relations. Malicious alteration cannot be detected in all cases. In this paper we argue that watermarking database indexes in addition to the database tables would improve the detection of unauthorized alterations. Usually, each database table in commercial applications has more than one index attached to it. Thus, watermarking the database table and all its indexes improve the likelihood of detecting malicious attacks. In general, watermarking different indexes like R-trees, B-trees, Hashes, require different watermarking techniques and exploit different redundancies in the underlying data structure. This diversity in watermarking techniques contributes to the overall integrity of the databases. Traditional relational watermarks introduce some error to the watermarked values and thus cannot be applied to all attributes. This paper proposes a novel watermarking scheme for R-tree data structures that does not change the values of the attributes. Moreover, the watermark does not change the size of the R-tree. The proposed technique takes advantage of the fact that R-trees do not put conditions on the order of entries inside the node. In the proposed scheme, entries inside R-tree nodes are rearranged, relative to a ''secret'' initial order (a secret key), in a way that corresponds to the value of the watermark. To achieve that, we propose a one-to-one mapping between all possible permutations of entries in the R-tree node and all possible values of the watermark. Without loss of generality, watermarks are assumed to be numeric values. The proposed mapping employs a numbering system that uses variable base with factorial value. The detection rate of the malicious attacks depends on the nature of the attack, distribution of the data, and the size of the R-tree node. Our extensive analysis and experimental results showed that the proposed technique detects data alteration with high probability (that reaches up to 99%) on real datasets using reasonable node sizes and attack model. The watermark insertion and extraction are mainly main memory operations, and thus, have minimal effect on the cost of R-tree operations.
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paper_title: Towards Graph Watermarks

paper_content:

From network topologies to online social networks, many of today's most sensitive datasets are captured in large graphs. A significant challenge facing the data owners is how to share sensitive graphs with collaborators or authorized users, e.g. ISP's network topology graphs with a third party networking equipment vendor. Current tools can provide limited node or edge privacy, but significantly modify the graph reducing its utility. In this work, we propose a new alternative in the form of graph watermarks. Graph watermarks are small graphs tailor-made for a given graph dataset, a secure graph key, and a secure user key. To share a sensitive graph G with a collaborator C, the owner generates a watermark graph W using G, the graph key, and C's key as input, and embeds W into G to form G'. If G' is leaked by C, its owner can reliably determine if the watermark W generated for C does in fact reside inside G', thereby proving C is responsible for the leak. Graph watermarks serve both as a deterrent against data leakage and a method of recourse after a leak. We provide robust schemes for embedding and extracting watermarks, and use analysis and experiments on large real graphs to show that they are unique and difficult to forge. We study the robustness of graph watermarks against both single and powerful colluding attacker models, then propose and evaluate mechanisms to dramatically improve resilience.
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paper_title: Rights protection for discrete numeric streams

paper_content:

Today's world of increasingly dynamic environments naturally results in more and more data being available as fast streams. Applications such as stock market analysis, environmental sensing, Web clicks, and intrusion detection are just a few of the examples where valuable data is streamed. Often, streaming information is offered on the basis of a nonexclusive, single-use customer license. One major concern, especially given the digital nature of the valuable stream, is the ability to easily record and potentially "replay" parts of it in the future. If there is value associated with such future replays, it could constitute enough incentive for a malicious customer (Mallory) to record and duplicate data segments, subsequently reselling them for profit. Being able to protect against such infringements becomes a necessity. In this work, we introduce the issue of rights protection for discrete streaming data through watermarking. This is a novel problem with many associated challenges including: operating in a finite window, single-pass, (possibly) high-speed streaming model, and surviving natural domain specific transforms and attacks (e.g., extreme sparse sampling and summarizations), while at the same time keeping data alterations within allowable bounds. We propose a solution and analyze its resilience to various types of attacks as well as some of the important expected domain-specific transforms, such as sampling and summarization. We implement a proof of concept software (wms.*) and perform experiments on real sensor data from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility at the University of Hawaii, to assess encoding resilience levels in practice. Our solution proves to be well suited for this new domain. For example, we can recover an over 97 percent confidence watermark from a highly down-sampled (e.g., less than 8 percent) stream or survive stream summarization (e.g., 20 percent) and random alteration attacks with very high confidence levels, often above 99 percent.
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paper_title: Rights protection for relational data

paper_content:

Protecting rights over relational data is of ever increasing interest, especially considering areas where sensitive, valuable content is to be outsourced. A good example is a data mining application, where data is sold in pieces to parties specialized in mining it.Different avenues for rights protection are available, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. Enforcement by legal means is usually ineffective in preventing theft of copyrighted works, unless augmented by a digital counter-part, for example watermarking.Recent research of the authors introduces the issue of digital watermarking for generic number sets. In the present paper we expand on this foundation and introduce a solution for relational database content rights protection through watermarking.Our solution addresses important attacks, such as data re-sorting, subset selection, linear data changes (applying a linear transformation on arbitrary subsets of the data). Our watermark also survives up to 50% and above data loss.Finally we present wmdb.*, a proof-of-concept implementation of our algorithm and its application to real life data, namely in watermarking the outsourced Wal-Mart sales data that we have available at our institute.
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paper_title: Watermarking of three-dimensional objects by digital holography.

paper_content:

We present an optical method for information watermarking of three-dimensional (3D) objects by digital holography. A hidden image is embedded by double phase encoding in a phase-shift digital hologram of the 3D object. We decode the watermarked hologram to reconstruct the hidden image and the 3D object. We use either the entire hologram or a part of it to decode the hidden image. Experiments are presented to illustrate the ability to recover both the 3D object and the decoded hidden image. Digital holograms of the 3D object are obtained by optical experiments. The watermarking process, 3D object reconstruction, and hidden image recovery are performed digitally. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of 3D object watermarking by use of a phase encoding technique and digital holography.
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paper_title: Digital Watermarking

paper_content:

Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.
---
paper_title: Multimedia Watermarking Techniques

paper_content:

Multimedia watermarking technology has evolved very quickly during the last few years. A digital watermark is information that is imperceptibly and robustly embedded in the host data such that it cannot be removed. A watermark typically contains information about the origin, status, or recipient of the host data. In this tutorial paper, the requirements and applications for watermarking are reviewed. Applications include copyright protection, data monitoring, and data tracking. The basic concepts of watermarking systems are outlined and illustrated with proposed watermarking methods for images, video, audio, text documents, and other media. Robustness and security aspects are discussed in detail. Finally, a few remarks are made about the state of the art and possible future developments in watermarking technology.
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paper_title: Authenticating Streamed Data in the Presence of Random Packet Loss

paper_content:

We propose a new scheme for authenticating streamed data delivered in real-time over an insecure network. The difficulty of signing live streams is twofold. First, authentication must be efficient so the stream can be processed without delay. Secondly, authentication must be possible even if some packets in the sequence are missing. Streams of audio or video provide a good example. They must be processed in real-time and are commonly exchanged over UDP, with no guarantee that every packet will be delivered. Existing solutions to the problem of signing streams have been designed to resist worst-case packet loss. In practice however, network loss is not malicious but occurs in patterns of consecutive packets known as bursts. Based on this realistic model of network loss, we propose an authentication scheme for streams which achieves better performance as well as much lower communication overhead than existing solutions. We have implemented our constructions as plug-ins to the RealSystem platform from Real Networks to authenticate audio and video streams.
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paper_title: The First 50 Years of Electronic Watermarking

paper_content:

Electronic watermarking can be traced back as far as 1954. The last 10 years has seen considerable interest in digital watermarking, due, in large part, to concerns about illegal piracy of copyrighted content. In this paper, we consider the following questions: is the interest warranted? What are the commercial applications of the technology? What scientific progress has been made in the last 10 years? What are the most exciting areas for research? And where might the next 10 years take us? In our opinion, the interest in watermarking is appropriate. However, we expect that copyright applications will be overshadowed by applications such as broadcast monitoring, authentication, and tracking content distributed within corporations. We further see a variety of applications emerging that add value to media, such as annotation and linking content to the Web. These latter applications may turn out to be the most compelling. Considerable progress has been made toward enabling these applications--perceptual modelling, security threats and countermeasures, and the development of a bag of tricks for efficient implementations. Further progress is needed in methods for handling geometric and temporal distortions. We expect other exciting developments to arise from research in informed watermarking.
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paper_title: Quantization Index Modulation: A Class of Provably Good Methods for Digital Watermarking and Information Embedding

paper_content:

We consider the problem of embedding one signal (e.g., a digital watermark), within another "host" signal to form a third, "composite" signal. The embedding is designed to achieve efficient tradeoffs among the three conflicting goals of maximizing the information-embedding rate, minimizing the distortion between the host signal and composite signal, and maximizing the robustness of the embedding. We introduce new classes of embedding methods, termed quantization index modulation (QIM) and distortion-compensated QIM (DC-QIM), and develop convenient realizations in the form of what we refer to as dither modulation. Using deterministic models to evaluate digital watermarking methods, we show that QIM is "provably good" against arbitrary bounded and fully informed attacks, which arise in several copyright applications, and in particular it achieves provably better rate distortion-robustness tradeoffs than currently popular spread-spectrum and low-bit(s) modulation methods. Furthermore, we show that for some important classes of probabilistic models, DC-QIM is optimal (capacity-achieving) and regular QIM is near-optimal. These include both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, which may be good models for hybrid transmission applications such as digital audio broadcasting, and mean-square-error-constrained attack channels that model private-key watermarking applications.
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paper_title: Digital Watermarking

paper_content:

Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.
---
paper_title: Digital Audio Watermarking Techniques and Technologies: Applications and Benchmarks

paper_content:

"Digital audio watermarking has been proposed as a new and alternative method to enforce intellectual property rights and protect digital audio from tampering. Digital Audio Watermarking Techniques and Technologies: Applications and Benchmarks is a comprehensive compilation of the major theoretical frameworks, research findings, and practical applications. With inclusive coverage of the most authoritative research in the area, Digital Audio Watermarking Techniques and Technologies: Applications and Benchmarks will serve as a vital reference to researchers and practitioners in a variety of disciplines, including engineering, information technology, and digital audio. With value to a diverse range of users, this Premier Reference Source suits libraries in numerous settings."
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paper_title: Robust Correlation of Encrypted Attack Traffic through Stepping Stones by Flow Watermarking

paper_content:

Network-based intruders seldom attack their victims directly from their own computer. Often, they stage their attacks through intermediate “stepping stones” in order to conceal their identity and origin. To identify the source of the attack behind the stepping stone(s), it is necessary to correlate the incoming and outgoing flows or connections of a stepping stone. To resist attempts at correlation, the attacker may encrypt or otherwise manipulate the connection traffic. Timing-based correlation approaches have been shown to be quite effective in correlating encrypted connections. However, timing-based correlation approaches are subject to timing perturbations that may be deliberately introduced by the attacker at stepping stones. In this paper, we propose a novel watermark-based-correlation scheme that is designed specifically to be robust against timing perturbations. Unlike most previous timing-based correlation approaches, our watermark-based approach is “active” in that it embeds a unique watermark into the encrypted flows by slightly adjusting the timing of selected packets. The unique watermark that is embedded in the encrypted flow gives us a number of advantages over passive timing-based correlation in resisting timing perturbations by the attacker. In contrast to the existing passive correlation approaches, our active watermark-based correlation does not make any limiting assumptions about the distribution or random process of the original interpacket timing of the packet flow. In theory, our watermark-based correlation can achieve arbitrarily close to 100 percent correlation true positive rate (TPR), and arbitrarily close to 0 percent false positive rate (FPR) at the same time for sufficiently long flows, despite arbitrarily large (but bounded) timing perturbations of any distribution by the attacker. Our paper is the first that identifies 1) accurate quantitative tradeoffs between the achievable correlation effectiveness and the defining characteristics of the timing perturbation; and 2) a provable upper bound on the number of packets needed to achieve a desired correlation effectiveness, given the amount of timing perturbation. Experimental results show that our active watermark-based correlation performs better and requires fewer packets than existing, passive timing-based correlation methods in the presence of random timing perturbations.
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paper_title: A schema for protecting the integrity of databases

paper_content:

Unauthorized changes to databases can result in significant losses for organizations as well as individuals. Watermarking can be used to protect the integrity of databases against unauthorized alterations. Prior work focused on watermarking database tables or relations. Malicious alteration cannot be detected in all cases. In this paper we argue that watermarking database indexes in addition to the database tables would improve the detection of unauthorized alterations. Usually, each database table in commercial applications has more than one index attached to it. Thus, watermarking the database table and all its indexes improve the likelihood of detecting malicious attacks. In general, watermarking different indexes like R-trees, B-trees, Hashes, require different watermarking techniques and exploit different redundancies in the underlying data structure. This diversity in watermarking techniques contributes to the overall integrity of the databases. Traditional relational watermarks introduce some error to the watermarked values and thus cannot be applied to all attributes. This paper proposes a novel watermarking scheme for R-tree data structures that does not change the values of the attributes. Moreover, the watermark does not change the size of the R-tree. The proposed technique takes advantage of the fact that R-trees do not put conditions on the order of entries inside the node. In the proposed scheme, entries inside R-tree nodes are rearranged, relative to a ''secret'' initial order (a secret key), in a way that corresponds to the value of the watermark. To achieve that, we propose a one-to-one mapping between all possible permutations of entries in the R-tree node and all possible values of the watermark. Without loss of generality, watermarks are assumed to be numeric values. The proposed mapping employs a numbering system that uses variable base with factorial value. The detection rate of the malicious attacks depends on the nature of the attack, distribution of the data, and the size of the R-tree node. Our extensive analysis and experimental results showed that the proposed technique detects data alteration with high probability (that reaches up to 99%) on real datasets using reasonable node sizes and attack model. The watermark insertion and extraction are mainly main memory operations, and thus, have minimal effect on the cost of R-tree operations.
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paper_title: Data-Hiding Codes

paper_content:

This tutorial paper reviews the theory and design of codes for hiding or embedding information in signals such as images, video, audio, graphics,and text. Such codes have also been called watermarking codes; they can be used in a variety of applications, including copyright protection for digital media, content authentication, media forensics, data binding, and covert communications. Some of these applications imply the presence of an adversary attempting to disrupt the transmission of information to the receiver; other applications involve a noisy, generally unknown, communication channel. Our focus is on the mathematical models, fundamental principles, and code design techniques that are applicable to data hiding. The approach draws from basic concepts in information theory, coding theory, game theory, and signal processing,and is illustrated with applications to the problem of hiding data in images.
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paper_title: Public automated web-based evaluation service for watermarking schemes: StirMark benchmark

paper_content:

One of the main problems, which darkens the future of digital watermarking technologies, is the lack of detailed evaluation of existing marking schemes. This lack of benchmarking of current algorithms is blatant and confuses rights holders as well as software and hardware manufacturers and prevents them from using the solution appropriate to their needs. Indeed basing long-lived protection schemes on badly tested watermarking technology does not make sense. In this paper we will present the architecture of a public automated evaluation service we have developed for still images, sound and video. We will detail and justify our choice of evaluation profiles, that is the series of tests applied to different types of wa-termarking schemes. These evaluation profiles allow us to measure the reliability of a marking scheme to different levels from low to very high. Beside the known StirMark transformations, we will also detail new tests that will be included in this platform. One of them is intended to measure the real size of the key space. Indeed, if one is not careful, two different watermarking keys may produce interfering watermarks and as a consequence the actual space of keys is much smaller than it appears. Another set of tests is related to audio data and addresses the usual equalisation and normalisation but also time stretching, pitch shifting. Finally we propose a set of tests for fingerprinting applications. This includes: averaging of copies with different fingerprint, random ex-change of part between different copies and comparison between copies with selection of most/less frequently used position differences.
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paper_title: Digital Watermarking

paper_content:

Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.
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paper_title: Digital Audio Watermarking Techniques and Technologies: Applications and Benchmarks

paper_content:

"Digital audio watermarking has been proposed as a new and alternative method to enforce intellectual property rights and protect digital audio from tampering. Digital Audio Watermarking Techniques and Technologies: Applications and Benchmarks is a comprehensive compilation of the major theoretical frameworks, research findings, and practical applications. With inclusive coverage of the most authoritative research in the area, Digital Audio Watermarking Techniques and Technologies: Applications and Benchmarks will serve as a vital reference to researchers and practitioners in a variety of disciplines, including engineering, information technology, and digital audio. With value to a diverse range of users, this Premier Reference Source suits libraries in numerous settings."
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paper_title: Watermarking schemes evaluation

paper_content:

In this article we have used a duality approach to the watermarking evaluation problem by splitting the evaluation criteria into two (independent) groups: functionality and assurance. The first group represents a set of requirements that can be verified using agreed series of tests; the second is a set of levels to which each functionality is evaluated. These levels go from zero or low to very high. We are investigating how evaluation profiles can be defined for different applications and how importance sampling techniques could be used to evaluate the false alarm rate in an automated way.
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paper_title: The First 50 Years of Electronic Watermarking

paper_content:

Electronic watermarking can be traced back as far as 1954. The last 10 years has seen considerable interest in digital watermarking, due, in large part, to concerns about illegal piracy of copyrighted content. In this paper, we consider the following questions: is the interest warranted? What are the commercial applications of the technology? What scientific progress has been made in the last 10 years? What are the most exciting areas for research? And where might the next 10 years take us? In our opinion, the interest in watermarking is appropriate. However, we expect that copyright applications will be overshadowed by applications such as broadcast monitoring, authentication, and tracking content distributed within corporations. We further see a variety of applications emerging that add value to media, such as annotation and linking content to the Web. These latter applications may turn out to be the most compelling. Considerable progress has been made toward enabling these applications--perceptual modelling, security threats and countermeasures, and the development of a bag of tricks for efficient implementations. Further progress is needed in methods for handling geometric and temporal distortions. We expect other exciting developments to arise from research in informed watermarking.
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paper_title: Digital Watermarking

paper_content:

Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.
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paper_title: The First 50 Years of Electronic Watermarking

paper_content:

Electronic watermarking can be traced back as far as 1954. The last 10 years has seen considerable interest in digital watermarking, due, in large part, to concerns about illegal piracy of copyrighted content. In this paper, we consider the following questions: is the interest warranted? What are the commercial applications of the technology? What scientific progress has been made in the last 10 years? What are the most exciting areas for research? And where might the next 10 years take us? In our opinion, the interest in watermarking is appropriate. However, we expect that copyright applications will be overshadowed by applications such as broadcast monitoring, authentication, and tracking content distributed within corporations. We further see a variety of applications emerging that add value to media, such as annotation and linking content to the Web. These latter applications may turn out to be the most compelling. Considerable progress has been made toward enabling these applications--perceptual modelling, security threats and countermeasures, and the development of a bag of tricks for efficient implementations. Further progress is needed in methods for handling geometric and temporal distortions. We expect other exciting developments to arise from research in informed watermarking.
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paper_title: Secure data aggregation in wireless sensor networks: A comprehensive overview

paper_content:

Wireless sensor networks often consists of a large number of low-cost sensor nodes that have strictly limited sensing, computation, and communication capabilities. Due to resource restricted sensor nodes, it is important to minimize the amount of data transmission so that the average sensor lifetime and the overall bandwidth utilization are improved. Data aggregation is the process of summarizing and combining sensor data in order to reduce the amount of data transmission in the network. As wireless sensor networks are usually deployed in remote and hostile environments to transmit sensitive information, sensor nodes are prone to node compromise attacks and security issues such as data confidentiality and integrity are extremely important. Hence, wireless sensor network protocols, e.g., data aggregation protocol, must be designed with security in mind. This paper investigates the relationship between security and data aggregation process in wireless sensor networks. A taxonomy of secure data aggregation protocols is given by surveying the current ''state-of-the-art'' work in this area. In addition, based on the existing research, the open research areas and future research directions in secure data aggregation concept are provided.
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paper_title: In the shadows we trust: A secure aggregation tolerant watermark for data streams

paper_content:

In many applications such as sensor networks, e-healthcare and environmental monitoring, data is continuously streamed and combined from multiple resources in order to make decisions based on the aggregated data streams. One major concern in these applications is assuring high trustworthiness of the aggregated data stream for correct decision-making. For example, an adversary may compromise a few data-sources and introduce false data into the aggregated data-stream and cause catastrophic consequences. In this work, we propose a novel method for verifying data integrity by embedding several signature codes within data streams known as digital watermarking. Therefore, the integrity of the data streams can be verified by decoding the embedded signatures even as the data go through multiple stages of aggregation process. Although the idea of secure data aggregation based on digital watermarking has been explored before, we aim to improve the efficiency of the scheme by examining several signature codes that could also decrease the watermark detection complexity. This is achieved by simultaneous embedding of several shifted watermark patterns into aggregated data stream, such that the contribution of each data-source is hidden in the relative shifts of the patterns. We, also, derive conditions to preserve the main statistical properties of data-streams prior to the embedding procedure. Therefore, we can guarantee that the embedding procedure does not compromise the usability of data streams for any operations that depends on these statistical characteristics. The simulation results show that the embedded watermarks can successfully be recovered with high confidence if proper hiding codes are chosen.
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paper_title: SIA: Secure information aggregation in sensor networks

paper_content:

In sensor networks, data aggregation is a vital primitive enabling efficient data queries. An on-site aggregator device collects data from sensor nodes and produces a condensed summary which is forwarded to the off-site querier, thus reducing the communication cost of the query. Since the aggregator is on-site, it is vulnerable to physical compromise attacks. A compromised aggregator may report false aggregation results. Hence, it is essential that techniques are available to allow the querier to verify the integrity of the result returned by the aggregator node. ::: ::: We propose a novel framework for secure information aggregation in sensor networks. By constructing efficient random sampling mechanisms and interactive proofs, we enable the querier to verify that the answer given by the aggregator is a good approximation of the true value, even when the aggregator and a fraction of the sensor nodes are corrupted. In particular, we present efficient protocols for secure computation of the median and average of the measurements, for the estimation of the network size, for finding the minimum and maximum sensor reading, and for random sampling and leader election. Our protocols require only sublinear communication between the aggregator and the user.
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paper_title: A digital watermarking approach to secure and precise range query processing in sensor networks

paper_content:

Two-tiered wireless sensor networks offer good scalability, efficient power usage, and space saving. However, storage nodes are more attractive to attackers than sensors because they store sensor collected data and processing sink issued queries. A compromised storage node not only reveals sensor collected data, but also may reply incomplete or wrong query results. In this paper, we propose QuerySec, a protocol that enables storage nodes to process queries correctly while prevents them from revealing both data from sensors and queries from the sink. To protect privacy, we propose an order preserving function-based scheme to encode both sensor collected data and sink issued queries, which allows storage nodes to process queries correctly without knowing the actual values of both data and queries. To preserve integrity, we proposed a link watermarking scheme, where data items are formed into a link by the watermarks embedded in them so that any deletion in query results can be detected.
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paper_title: Medians and Beyond: New Aggregation Techniques for Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Wireless sensor networks offer the potential to span and monitor large geographical areas inexpensively. Sensors, however, have significant power constraint (battery life), making communication very expensive. Another important issue in the context of sensor-based information systems is that individual sensor readings are inherently unreliable. In order to address these two aspects, sensor database systems like TinyDB and Cougar enable in-network data aggregation to reduce the communication cost and improve reliability. The existing data aggregation techniques, however, are limited to relatively simple types of queries such as SUM, COUNT, AVG, and MIN/MAX. In this paper we propose a data aggregation scheme that significantly extends the class of queries that can be answered using sensor networks. These queries include (approximate) quantiles, such as the median, the most frequent data values, such as the consensus value, a histogram of the data distribution, as well as range queries. In our scheme, each sensor aggregates the data it has received from other sensors into a fixed (user specified) size message. We provide strict theoretical guarantees on the approximation quality of the queries in terms of the message size. We evaluate the performance of our aggregation scheme by simulation and demonstrate its accuracy, scalability and low resource utilization for highly variable input data sets.
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paper_title: Secure Provenance Transmission for Streaming Data

paper_content:

Many application domains, such as real-time financial analysis, e-healthcare systems, sensor networks, are characterized by continuous data streaming from multiple sources and through intermediate processing by multiple aggregators. Keeping track of data provenance in such highly dynamic context is an important requirement, since data provenance is a key factor in assessing data trustworthiness which is crucial for many applications. Provenance management for streaming data requires addressing several challenges, including the assurance of high processing throughput, low bandwidth consumption, storage efficiency and secure transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to securely transmit provenance for streaming data (focusing on sensor network) by embedding provenance into the interpacket timing domain while addressing the above mentioned issues. As provenance is hidden in another host-medium, our solution can be conceptualized as watermarking technique. However, unlike traditional watermarking approaches, we embed provenance over the interpacket delays (IPDs) rather than in the sensor data themselves, hence avoiding the problem of data degradation due to watermarking. Provenance is extracted by the data receiver utilizing an optimal threshold-based mechanism which minimizes the probability of provenance decoding errors. The resiliency of the scheme against outside and inside attackers is established through an extensive security analysis. Experiments show that our technique can recover provenance up to a certain level against perturbations to inter-packet timing characteristics.
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paper_title: Self-identifying sensor data

paper_content:

Public-use sensor datasets are a useful scientific resource with the unfortunate feature that their provenance is easily disconnected from their content. To address this we introduce a technique to directly associate provenance information with sensor datasets. Our technique is similar to traditional watermarking but is intended for application to unstructured datasets. Our approach is potentially imperceptible given sufficient margins of error in datasets, and is robust to a number of benign but likely transformations including truncation, rounding, bit-flipping, sampling, and reordering. We provide algorithms for both one-bit and blind mark checking. Our algorithms are probabilistic in nature and are characterized by a combinatorial analysis.
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paper_title: Applying Information Hiding in VANETs to Covertly Report Misbehaving Vehicles

paper_content:

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a new communication scenario in which vehicles take an active part. Real-time reporting of misbehaving vehicles by surrounding ones is enabled by in-vehicle sensors and VANETs. Thus, sensors allow detecting the misbehavior whereas VANETs allow sending the report to the authority. Nevertheless, these reports should pass unnoticed by the reported driver to avoid his/her potential reprisals. Information hiding techniques could be used to allow vehicles to transmit information covertly. In this work, two mechanisms for vehicle reporting are proposed based on two information hiding techniques—subliminal channels and steganography. The approach is to embed information into beacon messages either in the signature process (subliminal channel) or altering the least significant bits of selected sensorial fields (steganography). Results show that the proposal is computationally feasible for current vehicular devices and that it is possible to configure the system to operate in highways, secondary roads, and urban maps.
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paper_title: Embedding and Retrieving Private Metadata in Electrocardiograms

paper_content:

Due to the recent explosion of `identity theft' cases, the safeguarding of private data has been the focus of many scientific efforts. Medical data contain a number of sensitive attributes, whose access the rightful owner would ideally like to disclose only to authorized personnel. One way of providing limited access to sensitive data is through means of encryption. In this work we follow a different path, by proposing the fusion of the sensitive metadata within the medical data. Our work is focused on medical time-series signals and in particular on Electrocardiograms (ECG). We present techniques that allow the embedding and retrieval of sensitive numerical data, such as the patient's social security number or birth date, within the medical signal. The proposed technique not only allows the effective hiding of the sensitive metadata within the signal itself, but it additionally provides a way of authenticating the data ownership or providing assurances about the origin of the data. Our methodology builds upon watermarking notions, and presents the following desirable characteristics: (a) it does not distort important ECG characteristics, which are essential for proper medical diagnosis, (b) it allows not only the embedding but also the efficient retrieval of the embedded data, (c) it provides resilience and fault tolerance by employing multistage watermarks (both robust and fragile). Our experiments on real ECG data indicate the viability of the proposed scheme.
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paper_title: Wavelet Transformation Based Watermarking Technique for Human Electrocardiogram (ECG)

paper_content:

Nowadays, watermarking has become a technology of choice for a broad range of multimedia copyright protection applications. Watermarks have also been used to embed prespecified data in biomedical signals. Thus, the watermarked biomedical signals being transmitted through communication are resistant to some attacks. This paper investigates discrete wavelet transform based watermarking technique for signal integrity verification in an Electrocardiogram (ECG) coming from four ECG classes for monitoring application of cardiovascular diseases. The proposed technique is evaluated under different noisy conditions for different wavelet functions. Daubechies (db2) wavelet function based technique performs better than those of Biorthogonal (bior5.5) wavelet function. For the beat-to-beat applications, all performance results belonging to four ECG classes are highly moderate.
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paper_title: DNA Watermarking of Infectious Agents: Progress and Prospects

paper_content:

Following the 2001 anthrax attacks, infectious disease research laboratories and personnel were subjected to increased scrutiny amid concerns that the released agent originated from within such facilities. Since then, enhanced regulatory controls have been implemented to thwart the possibility of future releases. However, improved microbial forensics technologies have not been employed to facilitate fault attribution or to control and track agent inventories. ::: ::: We believe that novel systems employing enhanced identity protection will instill new public confidence in scientists and avoid erroneous assignment of liability in the case of a release. We propose a DNA watermarking system that includes institution-, laboratory-, and/or investigator-specific watermarks in the genomes of organisms, especially Select Agents. The system will achieve five key goals critical to any watermarking system, phrased in general information theoretic terms: message fidelity, error tolerance, ease of interpretation, availability of signatures, and resistance to attack (Table 1). ::: ::: ::: ::: Table 1 ::: ::: Goals and features of watermarking system. ::: ::: ::: ::: A DNA watermark is a unique synthetic DNA sequence embedded into the genome of a genetically tractable organism. The watermark provides a means for agent, isolate, or strain identification and tracking by PCR amplification and sequencing of the embedded tag. The power of watermarking for agent control emerges when the technology is linked to the activities of a trusted authorizing entity (Figure 1). This entity could, for example, be charged with distributing organisms containing unique watermark sequences to individual laboratories and/or investigators. These watermarks would distinguish their organisms from those of others in the research community. Laboratories would be encouraged, permitted, or required to use only strains that contain their approved, and confidential, watermark. In the event of release, the offending pathogen would be interrogated for the presence of an approved watermark. If such a watermark were present, then information about the possible source would become immediately available. Of course, pathogen-specific standard operating procedures (SOPs) that ensure the integrity of the watermarking system (to prevent cross-contamination, manage the sharing of strains, and prevent accidental or intentional misuse) would be a necessary component of any watermarking strategy. ::: ::: ::: ::: Figure 1 ::: ::: Proposed watermark implementation strategies. ::: ::: ::: ::: Previously developed watermarking technologies include approaches for embedding watermarks in microbial genomes [1]–[4] and strategies for encryption [2], [5], [6]. Each method seeks to develop a genetic cipher that is 1) robust to mutation, 2) easy for intended users to decipher, and 3) difficult for third parties to decipher or alter. While these strategies for manipulating watermarks have been successful at watermark encoding, placement in a genome, retrieval from a genome, and decoding, none of the techniques achieves all of the five goals (outlined in Table 1) that are necessary for a watermarking system for Select Agent tracking. ::: ::: In our opinion, however, these techniques are worthy of further investigation, as regards their utility for the research and biosecurity communities. We propose investigation proceed on three discrete but interconnected fronts. First, the theoretical mathematical and information aspects of watermarking systems must be examined and rigorously tested in silico. Second, insertion and removal of watermarks from microbial genomes must be assessed, and the phenotypic invisibility of the watermarks tested. Finally, pathogen-specific SOPs must be developed, keeping in mind the need for transparency and collaboration in research, and tested in a “role playing” scenario. Our initial work indicates that the model is mathematically plausible. Previous work in the use of watermarks suggests that appropriately placed watermarks can be phenotypically neutral [1], [3]. The technologies to introduce watermarks into several of the highest risk Select Agent genomes are currently available, using site-specific insertion tools such as Targetron (intron-based homing) and Lambda red mutagenesis. Adaptation of these or comparable genetic tools for less tractable Select Agents would require technological advances that would also broadly benefit research of each agent. ::: ::: Adoption of a watermarking strategy by research groups would need to be justified by a cost-benefit analysis, from an institutional liability perspective, and from the perspective of the research community. Several salient concerns can be readily identified. Our proposed system does not protect against covert usage of naturally occurring wild-type strains or remediate existing stocks, but instead provides a forward-looking strategy. To address cost concerns, funding agencies that require enhanced inventory control could be encouraged or required to support the cost of implementing watermarking systems. Similarly, these agencies could support or collaborate with private or public authorizing entities to develop SOPs for strain management. Finally, convincingly establishing phenotypic neutrality of genomic modifications will be non-trivial, and thus, will constitute an important area for future research. Despite these potential impediments, watermarking would nearly eliminate the potential for mistaken assignment of source for a suspected agent release. Moreover, the development and implementation costs may prove to be much less than other proposed measures for enhancing laboratory security, including around-the-clock security patrols. ::: ::: We considered two variations on the operational infrastructure required (Figure 1). An authorizing entity could (Figure 1A) design, insert, and distribute, or (Figure 1B) simply distribute, the secured watermark to requesting laboratory. In the latter scenario, the requesting laboratory would be responsible for adapting genetic technology to deliver the watermark. We do not propose that previously generated modified strains (mutant collections, etc.) would be modified and restocked. The transition to marked strains would be incremental but stable. We speculate that an efficient approach to this scenario would be to provide funding opportunities to establish and validate agent-specific systems. While there are several potential impediments to implementing the proposed watermarking systems, the combination of positive impact on lay perception of responsible scientific activity and an increased confidence in control of liability by investigators and institutions provides a rationale to investigate the development of watermarking tools for Select Agent research.
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paper_title: Alignment-based approach for durable data storage into living organisms.

paper_content:

The practical realization of DNA data storage is a major scientific goal. Here we introduce a simple, flexible, and robust data storage and retrieval method based on sequence alignment of the genomic DNA of living organisms. Duplicated data encoded by different oligonucleotide sequences was inserted redundantly into multiple loci of the Bacillus subtilis genome. Multiple alignment of the bit data sequences decoded by B. subtilis genome sequences enabled the retrieval of stable and compact data without the need for template DNA, parity checks, or error-correcting algorithms. Combined with the computational simulation of data retrieval from mutated message DNA, a practical use of this alignment-based method is discussed.
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paper_title: Capacity of DNA Data Embedding Under Substitution Mutations

paper_content:

A number of methods have been proposed over the last decade for encoding information using deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), giving rise to the emerging area of DNA data embedding. Since a DNA sequence is conceptually equivalent to a sequence of quaternary symbols (bases), DNA data embedding (diversely called DNA watermarking or DNA steganography) can be seen as a digital communications problem where channel errors are analogous to mutations of DNA bases. Depending on the use of coding or noncoding DNA host sequences, which, respectively, denote DNA segments that can or cannot be translated into proteins, DNA data embedding is essentially a problem of communications with or without side information at the encoder. In this paper, the Shannon capacity of DNA data embedding is obtained for the case in which DNA sequences are subject to substitution mutations modeled using the Kimura model from molecular evolution studies. Inferences are also drawn with respect to the biological implications of some of the results presented.
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paper_title: Watermarking sexually reproducing diploid organisms

paper_content:

Summary: DNA watermarks are used for hiding messages or for authenticating genetically modified organisms. Recently, we presented an algorithm called DNA-Crypt for generating DNA-based watermarks that can be integrated into the genome by using the characteristics of the degenerative genetic code. DNA-Crypt generates the watermark by replacing single bases and thus creating synonymous codons that encrypt the hidden information. Mutations within the integrated DNA sequence can be corrected using several mutation correction codes, to keep the hidden information intact. This method has successfully been tested in asexually replicating organisms like bacteria or yeast, where the watermark is duplicated with every cell division. It has been shown that DNA watermarks produced by DNA-Crypt do not influence the transcription or translation of a protein. In sexually reproducing diploid organisms, additional problems can occur, e.g. recombination events can destroy hidden information. Using population predictions as well as statistical analyses we identified a coupled Y-chromosomal/mitochondrial DNA watermarking procedure as the most appropriate for diploid organisms. We developed a mitochondria adapted version of DNA-Crypt, which is called Project Mito that can be used in combination with the original program. ::: ::: Availability: http://www.uni-muenster.de/Biologie.NeuroVer/Tumorbiologie/DNA-Crypt/index.html ::: ::: Contact: barneko@uni-muenster.de ::: ::: Password: WWUTB ::: ::: Requirements: Java 5.0 or higher ::: ::: Supplementary information:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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paper_title: On Data Publishing with Clustering Preservation

paper_content:

The emergence of cloud-based storage services is opening up new avenues in data exchange and data dissemination. This has amplified the interest in right-protection mechanisms to establish ownership in the event of data leakage. Current right-protection technologies, however, rarely provide strong guarantees on dataset utility after the protection process. This work presents techniques that explicitly address this topic and provably preserve the outcome of certain mining operations. In particular, we take special care to guarantee that the outcome of hierarchical clustering operations remains the same before and after right protection. Our approach considers all prevalent hierarchical clustering variants: single-, complete-, and average-linkage. We imprint the ownership in a dataset using watermarking principles, and we derive tight bounds on the expansion/contraction of distances incurred by the process. We leverage our analysis to design fast algorithms for right protection without exhaustively searching the vast design space. Finally, because the right-protection process introduces a user-tunable distortion on the dataset, we explore the possibility of using this mechanism for data obfuscation. We quantify the tradeoff between obfuscation and utility for spatiotemporal datasets and discover very favorable characteristics of the process. An additional advantage is that when one is interested in both right-protecting and obfuscating the original data values, the proposed mechanism can accomplish both tasks simultaneously.
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paper_title: Information Security in Big Data: Privacy and Data Mining

paper_content:

The growing popularity and development of data mining technologies bring serious threat to the security of individual,'s sensitive information. An emerging research topic in data mining, known as privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM), has been extensively studied in recent years. The basic idea of PPDM is to modify the data in such a way so as to perform data mining algorithms effectively without compromising the security of sensitive information contained in the data. Current studies of PPDM mainly focus on how to reduce the privacy risk brought by data mining operations, while in fact, unwanted disclosure of sensitive information may also happen in the process of data collecting, data publishing, and information (i.e., the data mining results) delivering. In this paper, we view the privacy issues related to data mining from a wider perspective and investigate various approaches that can help to protect sensitive information. In particular, we identify four different types of users involved in data mining applications, namely, data provider, data collector, data miner, and decision maker. For each type of user, we discuss his privacy concerns and the methods that can be adopted to protect sensitive information. We briefly introduce the basics of related research topics, review state-of-the-art approaches, and present some preliminary thoughts on future research directions. Besides exploring the privacy-preserving approaches for each type of user, we also review the game theoretical approaches, which are proposed for analyzing the interactions among different users in a data mining scenario, each of whom has his own valuation on the sensitive information. By differentiating the responsibilities of different users with respect to security of sensitive information, we would like to provide some useful insights into the study of PPDM.
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paper_title: A schema for protecting the integrity of databases

paper_content:

Unauthorized changes to databases can result in significant losses for organizations as well as individuals. Watermarking can be used to protect the integrity of databases against unauthorized alterations. Prior work focused on watermarking database tables or relations. Malicious alteration cannot be detected in all cases. In this paper we argue that watermarking database indexes in addition to the database tables would improve the detection of unauthorized alterations. Usually, each database table in commercial applications has more than one index attached to it. Thus, watermarking the database table and all its indexes improve the likelihood of detecting malicious attacks. In general, watermarking different indexes like R-trees, B-trees, Hashes, require different watermarking techniques and exploit different redundancies in the underlying data structure. This diversity in watermarking techniques contributes to the overall integrity of the databases. Traditional relational watermarks introduce some error to the watermarked values and thus cannot be applied to all attributes. This paper proposes a novel watermarking scheme for R-tree data structures that does not change the values of the attributes. Moreover, the watermark does not change the size of the R-tree. The proposed technique takes advantage of the fact that R-trees do not put conditions on the order of entries inside the node. In the proposed scheme, entries inside R-tree nodes are rearranged, relative to a ''secret'' initial order (a secret key), in a way that corresponds to the value of the watermark. To achieve that, we propose a one-to-one mapping between all possible permutations of entries in the R-tree node and all possible values of the watermark. Without loss of generality, watermarks are assumed to be numeric values. The proposed mapping employs a numbering system that uses variable base with factorial value. The detection rate of the malicious attacks depends on the nature of the attack, distribution of the data, and the size of the R-tree node. Our extensive analysis and experimental results showed that the proposed technique detects data alteration with high probability (that reaches up to 99%) on real datasets using reasonable node sizes and attack model. The watermark insertion and extraction are mainly main memory operations, and thus, have minimal effect on the cost of R-tree operations.
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paper_title: Indexing information for data forensics

paper_content:

We introduce novel techniques for organizing the indexing structures of how data is stored so that alterations from an original version can be detected and the changed values specifically identified. We give forensic constructions for several fundamental data structures, including arrays, linked lists, binary search trees, skip lists, and hash tables. Some of our constructions are based on a new reduced-randomness construction for nonadaptive combinatorial group testing.
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paper_title: Aggregation-tolerant steganography for data-stream integrity verification

paper_content:

Data outsourcing can make data-integrity protection a challenging task, especially when the trustworthiness of a third-party is unproven. A novel auditing process for integrity verification of data stream, whose storage and handling is outsourced to a third-party, is explored. For this purpose, the hidden information within this data that provides support for in-network data aggregation environments, such as sensor networks is masked. This mask is achieved by simultaneous embedding of several shifted watermark patterns into multiple data streams. The nature of this watermark allows it to be aggregated into a single data stream with minimal loss of this information. A great benefit of the proposed scheme is that the embedded watermarks are invariant to linear time-sequential or cross-stream aggregation operations, such as summation or averaging. Therefore, multiple data streams can be merged and at the same time, and the existence of each individual watermark within allowable bounds can still be verified. The simulation results show that the embedded watermarks can successfully be recovered with high confidence if proper hiding codes are chosen.
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paper_title: CensorSpoofer: asymmetric communication using IP spoofing for censorship-resistant web browsing

paper_content:

A key challenge in censorship-resistant web browsing is being able to direct legitimate users to redirection proxies while preventing censors, posing as insiders, from discovering their addresses and blocking them. We propose a new framework for censorship-resistant web browsing called CensorSpoofer that addresses this challenge by exploiting the asymmetric nature of web browsing traffic and making use of IP spoofing. CensorSpoofer de-couples the upstream and downstream channels, using a low-bandwidth indirect channel for delivering outbound requests (URLs) and a high-bandwidth direct channel for downloading web content. The upstream channel hides the request contents using steganographic encoding within Email or instant messages, whereas the downstream channel uses IP address spoofing so that the real address of the proxies is not revealed either to legitimate users or censors. We built a proof-of-concept prototype that uses encrypted VoIP for this downstream channel and demonstrated the feasibility of using the CensorSpoofer framework in a realistic environment.
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paper_title: Privacy and ownership preserving of outsourced medical data

paper_content:

The demand for the secondary use of medical data is increasing steadily to allow for the provision of better quality health care. Two important issues pertaining to this sharing of data have to be addressed: one is the privacy protection for individuals referred to in the data; the other is copyright protection over the data. In this paper, we present a unified framework that seamlessly combines techniques of binning and digital watermarking to attain the dual goals of privacy and copyright protection. Our binning method is built upon an earlier approach of generalization and suppression by allowing a broader concept of generalization. To ensure data usefulness, we propose constraining binning by usage metrics that define maximal allowable information loss, and the metrics can be enforced off-line. Our watermarking algorithm watermarks the binned data in a hierarchical manner by leveraging on the very nature of the data. The method is resilient to the generalization attack that is specific to the binned data, as well as other attacks intended to destroy the inserted mark. We prove that watermarking could not adversely interfere with binning, and implemented the framework. Experiments were conducted, and the results show the robustness of the proposed framework.
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paper_title: Trusted Cloud Computing with Secure Resources and Data Coloring

paper_content:

Trust and security have prevented businesses from fully accepting cloud platforms. To protect clouds, providers must first secure virtualized data center resources, uphold user privacy, and preserve data integrity. The authors suggest using a trust-overlay network over multiple data centers to implement a reputation system for establishing trust between service providers and data owners. Data coloring and software watermarking techniques protect shared data objects and massively distributed software modules. These techniques safeguard multi-way authentications, enable single sign-on in the cloud, and tighten access control for sensitive data in both public and private clouds.
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paper_title: Watermarking of three-dimensional objects by digital holography.

paper_content:

We present an optical method for information watermarking of three-dimensional (3D) objects by digital holography. A hidden image is embedded by double phase encoding in a phase-shift digital hologram of the 3D object. We decode the watermarked hologram to reconstruct the hidden image and the 3D object. We use either the entire hologram or a part of it to decode the hidden image. Experiments are presented to illustrate the ability to recover both the 3D object and the decoded hidden image. Digital holograms of the 3D object are obtained by optical experiments. The watermarking process, 3D object reconstruction, and hidden image recovery are performed digitally. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of 3D object watermarking by use of a phase encoding technique and digital holography.
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paper_title: A method for trust management in cloud computing: Data coloring by cloud watermarking

paper_content:

With the development of Internet technology and human computing, the computing environment has changed dramatically over the last three decades. Cloud computing emerges as a paradigm of Internet computing in which dynamical, scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as services. With virtualization technology, cloud computing offers diverse services (such as virtual computing, virtual storage, virtual bandwidth, etc.) for the public by means of multi-tenancy mode. Although users are enjoying the capabilities of super-computing and mass storage supplied by cloud computing, cloud security still remains as a hot spot problem, which is in essence the trust management between data owners and storage service providers. In this paper, we propose a data coloring method based on cloud watermarking to recognize and ensure mutual reputations. The experimental results show that the robustness of reverse cloud generator can guarantee users' embedded social reputation identifications. Hence, our work provides a reference solution to the critical problem of cloud security.
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paper_title: SWIRL: A Scalable Watermark to Detect Correlated Network Flows

paper_content:

Flow watermarks are active traffic analysis techniques that help establish a causal connection between two network flows by content-independent manipulations, e.g., altering packet timings. Watermarks provide a much more scalable approach for flow correlation than passive traffic analysis. Previous designs of scalable watermarks, however, were subject to multi-flow attacks. They also introduced delays too large to be used in most environments. We design SWIRL, a Scalable Watermark that is Invisible and Resilient to packet Losses. SWIRL is the first watermark that is practical to use for large-scale traffic analysis. SWIRL uses a flow-dependent approach to resist multi-flow attacks, marking each flow with a different pattern. SWIRL is robust to packet losses and network jitter, yet it introduces only small delays that are invisible to both benign users and determined adversaries. We analyze the performance of SWIRL both analytically and on the PlanetLab testbed, demonstrating very low error rates. We consider applications of SWIRL to stepping stone detection and linking anonymous communication. We also propose a novel application of watermarks to defend against congestion attacks on Tor.
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paper_title: CensorSpoofer: asymmetric communication using IP spoofing for censorship-resistant web browsing

paper_content:

A key challenge in censorship-resistant web browsing is being able to direct legitimate users to redirection proxies while preventing censors, posing as insiders, from discovering their addresses and blocking them. We propose a new framework for censorship-resistant web browsing called CensorSpoofer that addresses this challenge by exploiting the asymmetric nature of web browsing traffic and making use of IP spoofing. CensorSpoofer de-couples the upstream and downstream channels, using a low-bandwidth indirect channel for delivering outbound requests (URLs) and a high-bandwidth direct channel for downloading web content. The upstream channel hides the request contents using steganographic encoding within Email or instant messages, whereas the downstream channel uses IP address spoofing so that the real address of the proxies is not revealed either to legitimate users or censors. We built a proof-of-concept prototype that uses encrypted VoIP for this downstream channel and demonstrated the feasibility of using the CensorSpoofer framework in a realistic environment.
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paper_title: RAINBOW: A Robust And Invisible Non-Blind Watermark for Network Flows

paper_content:

Linking network flows is an important problem in intrusion detection as well as anonymity. Passive traffic analysis can link flows but requires long periods of observation to reduce errors. Watermarking techniques allow for better precision and blind detection, but they do so by introducing significant delays to the traffic flow, enabling attacks that detect and remove the mark, while at the same time slowing down legitimate traffic. We propose a new, non-blind watermarking scheme called RAINBOW that is able to use delays hundreds of times smaller than existing watermarks by eliminating the interference caused by the flow in the blind case. As a result, our watermark is invisible to detection, as confirmed by experiments using information-theoretic detection tools. We analyze the error rates of our scheme based on a mathematical model of network traffic and jitter. We also validate the analysis using an implementation running on PlanetLab. We find that our scheme generates orders of magnitudes lower rates of false errors than passive traffic analysis, while using only a few hundred observed packets. We also extend our scheme so that it is robust to packet drops and repacketization and show that flows can still be reliably linked, though at the cost of somewhat longer observation periods.
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paper_title: Robust Correlation of Encrypted Attack Traffic through Stepping Stones by Flow Watermarking

paper_content:

Network-based intruders seldom attack their victims directly from their own computer. Often, they stage their attacks through intermediate “stepping stones” in order to conceal their identity and origin. To identify the source of the attack behind the stepping stone(s), it is necessary to correlate the incoming and outgoing flows or connections of a stepping stone. To resist attempts at correlation, the attacker may encrypt or otherwise manipulate the connection traffic. Timing-based correlation approaches have been shown to be quite effective in correlating encrypted connections. However, timing-based correlation approaches are subject to timing perturbations that may be deliberately introduced by the attacker at stepping stones. In this paper, we propose a novel watermark-based-correlation scheme that is designed specifically to be robust against timing perturbations. Unlike most previous timing-based correlation approaches, our watermark-based approach is “active” in that it embeds a unique watermark into the encrypted flows by slightly adjusting the timing of selected packets. The unique watermark that is embedded in the encrypted flow gives us a number of advantages over passive timing-based correlation in resisting timing perturbations by the attacker. In contrast to the existing passive correlation approaches, our active watermark-based correlation does not make any limiting assumptions about the distribution or random process of the original interpacket timing of the packet flow. In theory, our watermark-based correlation can achieve arbitrarily close to 100 percent correlation true positive rate (TPR), and arbitrarily close to 0 percent false positive rate (FPR) at the same time for sufficiently long flows, despite arbitrarily large (but bounded) timing perturbations of any distribution by the attacker. Our paper is the first that identifies 1) accurate quantitative tradeoffs between the achievable correlation effectiveness and the defining characteristics of the timing perturbation; and 2) a provable upper bound on the number of packets needed to achieve a desired correlation effectiveness, given the amount of timing perturbation. Experimental results show that our active watermark-based correlation performs better and requires fewer packets than existing, passive timing-based correlation methods in the presence of random timing perturbations.
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paper_title: Network Flow Watermarking Attack on Low-Latency Anonymous Communication Systems

paper_content:

Many proposed low-latency anonymous communication systems have used various flow transformations such as traffic padding, adding cover traffic (or bogus packets), packet dropping, flow mixing, flow splitting, and flow merging to achieve anonymity. It has long been believed that these flow transformations would effectively disguise net-workflows, thus achieve good anonymity. In this paper, we investigate the fundamental limitations of flow transformations in achieving anonymity, and we show that flow transformations do not necessarily provide the level of anonymity people have expected or believed. By injecting unique watermark into the inter-packet timing domain of a packet flow, we are able to make any sufficiently long flow uniquely identifiable even if I) it is disguised by substantial amount of cover traffic, 2) it is mixed or merged with a number of other flows, 3) it is split into a number subflows, 4) there is a substantial portion of packets dropped, and 5) it is perturbed in timing due to either natural network delay jitter or deliberate timing perturbation. In addition to demonstrating the theoretical limitations of low-latency anonymous communications systems, we develop the first practical attack on the leading commercial low-latency anonymous communication system. Our real-time experiments show that our flow watermarking attack only needs about 10 minutes active Web browsing traffic to "penetrate" the total net shield service provided by www.anonymizer.com. Our analytical and empirical results demonstrate that achieving anonymity in low-latency communication systems is much harder than we have realized, and current flow transformation based low-latency anonymous communication systems need to be revisited.
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paper_title: On detecting co-resident cloud instances using network flow watermarking techniques

paper_content:

Virtualization is the cornerstone of the developing third-party compute industry, allowing cloud providers to instantiate multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single set of physical resources. Customers utilize cloud resources alongside unknown and untrusted parties, creating the co-resident threat--unless perfect isolation is provided by the virtual hypervisor, there exists the possibility for unauthorized access to sensitive customer information through the exploitation of covert side channels. This paper presents co-resident watermarking, a traffic analysis attack that allows a malicious co-resident VM to inject a watermark signature into the network flow of a target instance. This watermark can be used to exfiltrate and broadcast co-residency data from the physical machine, compromising isolation without reliance on internal side channels. As a result, our approach is difficult to defend against without costly underutilization of the physical machine. We evaluate co-resident watermarkingunder a large variety of conditions, system loads and hardware configurations, from a local laboratory environment to production cloud environments (Futuregrid and the University of Oregon's ACISS). We demonstrate the ability to initiate a covert channel of 4 bits per second, and we can confirm co-residency with a target VM instance in $$<$$ < 10 s. We also show that passive load measurement of the target and subsequent behavior profiling is possible with this attack. We go on to consider the detectability of co-resident watermarking, extending our scheme to create a subtler watermarking attack by imitating legitimate cloud customer behavior. Our investigation demonstrates the need for the careful design of hardware to be used in the cloud.
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paper_title: Embedding and Retrieving Private Metadata in Electrocardiograms

paper_content:

Due to the recent explosion of `identity theft' cases, the safeguarding of private data has been the focus of many scientific efforts. Medical data contain a number of sensitive attributes, whose access the rightful owner would ideally like to disclose only to authorized personnel. One way of providing limited access to sensitive data is through means of encryption. In this work we follow a different path, by proposing the fusion of the sensitive metadata within the medical data. Our work is focused on medical time-series signals and in particular on Electrocardiograms (ECG). We present techniques that allow the embedding and retrieval of sensitive numerical data, such as the patient's social security number or birth date, within the medical signal. The proposed technique not only allows the effective hiding of the sensitive metadata within the signal itself, but it additionally provides a way of authenticating the data ownership or providing assurances about the origin of the data. Our methodology builds upon watermarking notions, and presents the following desirable characteristics: (a) it does not distort important ECG characteristics, which are essential for proper medical diagnosis, (b) it allows not only the embedding but also the efficient retrieval of the embedded data, (c) it provides resilience and fault tolerance by employing multistage watermarks (both robust and fragile). Our experiments on real ECG data indicate the viability of the proposed scheme.
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paper_title: Aggregation-tolerant steganography for data-stream integrity verification

paper_content:

Data outsourcing can make data-integrity protection a challenging task, especially when the trustworthiness of a third-party is unproven. A novel auditing process for integrity verification of data stream, whose storage and handling is outsourced to a third-party, is explored. For this purpose, the hidden information within this data that provides support for in-network data aggregation environments, such as sensor networks is masked. This mask is achieved by simultaneous embedding of several shifted watermark patterns into multiple data streams. The nature of this watermark allows it to be aggregated into a single data stream with minimal loss of this information. A great benefit of the proposed scheme is that the embedded watermarks are invariant to linear time-sequential or cross-stream aggregation operations, such as summation or averaging. Therefore, multiple data streams can be merged and at the same time, and the existence of each individual watermark within allowable bounds can still be verified. The simulation results show that the embedded watermarks can successfully be recovered with high confidence if proper hiding codes are chosen.
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paper_title: Steganography in Digital Media: Principles, Algorithms, and Applications

paper_content:

Steganography, the art of hiding of information in apparently innocuous objects or images, is a field with a rich heritage, and an area of rapid current development. This clear, self-contained guide shows you how to understand the building blocks of covert communication in digital media files and how to apply the techniques in practice, including those of steganalysis, the detection of steganography. Assuming only a basic knowledge in calculus and statistics, the book blends the various strands of steganography, including information theory, coding, signal estimation and detection, and statistical signal processing. Experiments on real media files demonstrate the performance of the techniques in real life, and most techniques are supplied with pseudo-code, making it easy to implement the algorithms. The book is ideal for students taking courses on steganography and information hiding, and is also a useful reference for engineers and practitioners working in media security and information assurance.
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paper_title: Capacity of DNA Data Embedding Under Substitution Mutations

paper_content:

A number of methods have been proposed over the last decade for encoding information using deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), giving rise to the emerging area of DNA data embedding. Since a DNA sequence is conceptually equivalent to a sequence of quaternary symbols (bases), DNA data embedding (diversely called DNA watermarking or DNA steganography) can be seen as a digital communications problem where channel errors are analogous to mutations of DNA bases. Depending on the use of coding or noncoding DNA host sequences, which, respectively, denote DNA segments that can or cannot be translated into proteins, DNA data embedding is essentially a problem of communications with or without side information at the encoder. In this paper, the Shannon capacity of DNA data embedding is obtained for the case in which DNA sequences are subject to substitution mutations modeled using the Kimura model from molecular evolution studies. Inferences are also drawn with respect to the biological implications of some of the results presented.
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paper_title: DWT based coding DNA watermarking for DNA copyright protection

paper_content:

Abstract DNA watermarking is a technique for copyright protection and ownership authentication of DNA sequences and ensures the security of private genetic information. This paper addresses issues regarding watermarking DNA coding sequences in the frequency domain that confer mutation resistance, amino acid conservation, and security. Multimedia watermarking is designed for robustness and invisibility mainly based on frequency domain representations. However, frequency domain watermarking for a coding DNA sequence is significantly constrained because the transformation and inverse transformation must be performed while completely conserving the amino acid sequence. In this paper, we present a coding DNA watermarking method in a lifting-based discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain that focuses on the feasibility of frequency domain watermarking for DNA sequences. Our method divides a coding DNA sequence into a number of subsequences and allocates all codons in subsequences to a numerical code using the histogram ranks of the amino acids. Our method then calculates a set of DWT coefficients for subsequences of synonymous codons and finds a subsequence among them with DWT coefficients that are optimal for embedding watermark bits. Finally, our method substitutes this sequence for a subsequence of codons. To secure the watermark, our method generates the binary watermark based on nonlinear congruential – pseudorandom number generator (NC-PRNG) and randomly selects the embeddable position in the DWT domain of the subsequence. We experimentally verified that our method ensures not only amino acid conservation and security but also resists a point mutation rate of approximately 18.5% point mutations.
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paper_title: Data hiding methods based upon DNA sequences

paper_content:

In this paper, three data hiding methods are proposed, based upon properties of DNA sequences. It is highlighted that DNA sequences possess some interesting properties which can be utilized to hide data. These three methods are: the Insertion Method, the Complementary Pair Method and the Substitution Method. For each method, a reference DNA sequence S is selected and the secret message M is incorporated into it so that S^' is obtained. S^' is then sent to the receiver and the receiver is able to identify and extract the message M hidden in S^'. Furthermore, the robustness and the tightly embedded capacity analysis of the three proposed methods are demonstrated. Finally, experimental results indicate a better performance of the proposed methods compared to the performance of the competing methods with respect to several parameters such as capacity, payload and bpn.
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paper_title: Embedding Permanent Watermarks in Synthetic Genes

paper_content:

As synthetic biology advances, labeling of genes or organisms, like other high-value products, will become important not only to pinpoint their identity, origin, or spread, but also for intellectual property, classification, bio-security or legal reasons. Ideally information should be inseparably interlaced into expressed genes. We describe a method for embedding messages within open reading frames of synthetic genes by adapting steganographic algorithms typically used for watermarking digital media files. Text messages are first translated into a binary string, and then represented in the reading frame by synonymous codon choice. To aim for good expression of the labeled gene in its host as well as retain a high degree of codon assignment flexibility for gene optimization, codon usage tables of the target organism are taken into account. Preferably amino acids with 4 or 6 synonymous codons are used to comprise binary digits. Several different messages were embedded into open reading frames of T7 RNA polymerase, GFP, human EMG1 and HIV gag, variously optimized for bacterial, yeast, mammalian or plant expression, without affecting their protein expression or function. We also introduced Vigenère polyalphabetic substitution to cipher text messages, and developed an identifier as a key to deciphering codon usage ranking stored for a specific organism within a sequence of 35 nucleotides.
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paper_title: Watermarking sexually reproducing diploid organisms

paper_content:

Summary: DNA watermarks are used for hiding messages or for authenticating genetically modified organisms. Recently, we presented an algorithm called DNA-Crypt for generating DNA-based watermarks that can be integrated into the genome by using the characteristics of the degenerative genetic code. DNA-Crypt generates the watermark by replacing single bases and thus creating synonymous codons that encrypt the hidden information. Mutations within the integrated DNA sequence can be corrected using several mutation correction codes, to keep the hidden information intact. This method has successfully been tested in asexually replicating organisms like bacteria or yeast, where the watermark is duplicated with every cell division. It has been shown that DNA watermarks produced by DNA-Crypt do not influence the transcription or translation of a protein. In sexually reproducing diploid organisms, additional problems can occur, e.g. recombination events can destroy hidden information. Using population predictions as well as statistical analyses we identified a coupled Y-chromosomal/mitochondrial DNA watermarking procedure as the most appropriate for diploid organisms. We developed a mitochondria adapted version of DNA-Crypt, which is called Project Mito that can be used in combination with the original program. ::: ::: Availability: http://www.uni-muenster.de/Biologie.NeuroVer/Tumorbiologie/DNA-Crypt/index.html ::: ::: Contact: barneko@uni-muenster.de ::: ::: Password: WWUTB ::: ::: Requirements: Java 5.0 or higher ::: ::: Supplementary information:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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paper_title: Watermarking Graph Partitioning Solutions

paper_content:

The authors introduce an Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) technique for graph partitioning which watermarks solutions to the graph partitioning problems so that they carry an author's signature. This technique is completely transparent to the actual computer-aided design tool which does the partitioning and is implemented by preprocessing and postprocessing alone. The authors propose five different schemes for the watermarking of partitioning solutions. The goal is to construct a partitioning solution which not only has a small edge cut, but also encodes the signature of the author. The key idea of all of our schemes is to map the signature into a set of constraints and then satisfy a disproportionate number of these constraints. Four of our schemes are based upon the idea of encouraging groups of vertices to be in the same partition. The fifth is based upon the encouragement of certain edges to be cut by the partitioning. The fifth scheme shows superior performances on all of the cases which we tested, including both two-way and multiway partitioning. The watermarking scheme produces solutions that have very low-quality degradation levels, yet carry signatures that are convincingly unambiguous, extremely unlikely to be present by coincidence and difficult to detect or remove without completely resolving the partitioning problem.
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paper_title: Query-preserving watermarking of relational databases and XML documents

paper_content:

Watermarking allows robust and unobtrusive insertion of information in a digital document. Very recently, techniques have been proposed for watermarking relational databases or XML documents, where information insertion must preserve a specific measure on data (e.g. mean and variance of numerical attributes.)In this paper we investigate the problem of watermarking databases or XML while preserving a set of parametric queries in a specified language, up to an acceptable distortion.We first observe that unrestricted databases can not be watermarked while preserving trivial parametric queries. We then exhibit query languages and classes of structures that allow guaranteed watermarking capacity, namely 1) local query languages on structures with bounded degree Gaifman graph, and 2) monadic second-order queries on trees or tree-like structures. We relate these results to an important topic in computational learning theory, the VC-dimension. We finally consider incremental aspects of query-preserving watermarking.
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paper_title: Towards Graph Watermarks

paper_content:

From network topologies to online social networks, many of today's most sensitive datasets are captured in large graphs. A significant challenge facing the data owners is how to share sensitive graphs with collaborators or authorized users, e.g. ISP's network topology graphs with a third party networking equipment vendor. Current tools can provide limited node or edge privacy, but significantly modify the graph reducing its utility. In this work, we propose a new alternative in the form of graph watermarks. Graph watermarks are small graphs tailor-made for a given graph dataset, a secure graph key, and a secure user key. To share a sensitive graph G with a collaborator C, the owner generates a watermark graph W using G, the graph key, and C's key as input, and embeds W into G to form G'. If G' is leaked by C, its owner can reliably determine if the watermark W generated for C does in fact reside inside G', thereby proving C is responsible for the leak. Graph watermarks serve both as a deterrent against data leakage and a method of recourse after a leak. We provide robust schemes for embedding and extracting watermarks, and use analysis and experiments on large real graphs to show that they are unique and difficult to forge. We study the robustness of graph watermarks against both single and powerful colluding attacker models, then propose and evaluate mechanisms to dramatically improve resilience.
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paper_title: Quantization Index Modulation: A Class of Provably Good Methods for Digital Watermarking and Information Embedding

paper_content:

We consider the problem of embedding one signal (e.g., a digital watermark), within another "host" signal to form a third, "composite" signal. The embedding is designed to achieve efficient tradeoffs among the three conflicting goals of maximizing the information-embedding rate, minimizing the distortion between the host signal and composite signal, and maximizing the robustness of the embedding. We introduce new classes of embedding methods, termed quantization index modulation (QIM) and distortion-compensated QIM (DC-QIM), and develop convenient realizations in the form of what we refer to as dither modulation. Using deterministic models to evaluate digital watermarking methods, we show that QIM is "provably good" against arbitrary bounded and fully informed attacks, which arise in several copyright applications, and in particular it achieves provably better rate distortion-robustness tradeoffs than currently popular spread-spectrum and low-bit(s) modulation methods. Furthermore, we show that for some important classes of probabilistic models, DC-QIM is optimal (capacity-achieving) and regular QIM is near-optimal. These include both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, which may be good models for hybrid transmission applications such as digital audio broadcasting, and mean-square-error-constrained attack channels that model private-key watermarking applications.
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paper_title: Rights protection of trajectory datasets with nearest-neighbor preservation

paper_content:

Companies frequently outsource datasets to mining firms, and academic institutions create repositories or share datasets in the interest of promoting research collaboration. Still, many practitioners have reservations about sharing or outsourcing datasets, primarily because of fear of losing the principal rights over the dataset. This work presents a way of convincingly claiming ownership rights over a trajectory dataset, without, at the same time, destroying the salient dataset characteristics, which are important for accurate search operations and data-mining tasks. The digital watermarking methodology that we present distorts imperceptibly a collection of sequences, effectively embedding a secret key, while retaining as well as possible the neighborhood of each object, which is vital for operations such as similarity search, classification, or clustering. A key contribution in this methodology is a technique for discovering the maximum distortion that still maintains such desirable properties. We demonstrate both analytically and empirically that the proposed dataset marking techniques can withstand a number of attacks (such a translation, rotation, noise addition, etc) and therefore can provide a robust framework for facilitating the secure dissemination of trajectory datasets.
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paper_title: Digital Watermarking

paper_content:

Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.
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paper_title: On Data Publishing with Clustering Preservation

paper_content:

The emergence of cloud-based storage services is opening up new avenues in data exchange and data dissemination. This has amplified the interest in right-protection mechanisms to establish ownership in the event of data leakage. Current right-protection technologies, however, rarely provide strong guarantees on dataset utility after the protection process. This work presents techniques that explicitly address this topic and provably preserve the outcome of certain mining operations. In particular, we take special care to guarantee that the outcome of hierarchical clustering operations remains the same before and after right protection. Our approach considers all prevalent hierarchical clustering variants: single-, complete-, and average-linkage. We imprint the ownership in a dataset using watermarking principles, and we derive tight bounds on the expansion/contraction of distances incurred by the process. We leverage our analysis to design fast algorithms for right protection without exhaustively searching the vast design space. Finally, because the right-protection process introduces a user-tunable distortion on the dataset, we explore the possibility of using this mechanism for data obfuscation. We quantify the tradeoff between obfuscation and utility for spatiotemporal datasets and discover very favorable characteristics of the process. An additional advantage is that when one is interested in both right-protecting and obfuscating the original data values, the proposed mechanism can accomplish both tasks simultaneously.
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paper_title: Steganography in Digital Media: Principles, Algorithms, and Applications

paper_content:

Steganography, the art of hiding of information in apparently innocuous objects or images, is a field with a rich heritage, and an area of rapid current development. This clear, self-contained guide shows you how to understand the building blocks of covert communication in digital media files and how to apply the techniques in practice, including those of steganalysis, the detection of steganography. Assuming only a basic knowledge in calculus and statistics, the book blends the various strands of steganography, including information theory, coding, signal estimation and detection, and statistical signal processing. Experiments on real media files demonstrate the performance of the techniques in real life, and most techniques are supplied with pseudo-code, making it easy to implement the algorithms. The book is ideal for students taking courses on steganography and information hiding, and is also a useful reference for engineers and practitioners working in media security and information assurance.
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paper_title: Encoding numbers into reducible permutation graphs using heap-ordered trees

paper_content:

Information hiding is widely used in almost all intelligence and security software systems as a standard technology to prevent piracy and copyright infringement. This technology mainly involves the idea of digital watermarking where a unique identifier (or, watermark number) is embedded into software, image, audio, or video data through the introduction of errors not detectable by human perception. In software watermarking, the proposed graph theoretic methods usually encode watermark numbers as graphs whose structure resembles that of real program graphs. In this paper, in light of our recently published algorithms which encode a watermark number w as a self-inverting permutation, we present an efficient encoding method, along with its corresponding decoding one, which embeds a self-inverting permutation π* into reducible permutation graphs F[π*]. More precisely, we present an encoding algorithm which embeds the permutation π* into F[π*] by first computing the heap-ordered tree of π* (i.e., a rooted binary tree having specific node-value and child-parent properties) using the lattice representation of π* and then, based on the heap node-value properties, producing a reducible permutation graph F[π*]. Moreover, we exploit the max-heap and min-heap representation tree of permutation π* and show that we can efficiently encode the same watermark w into two different reducible permutation graphs F1[π*] and F2[π*]. In general, such a property increases the safety performance of a watermarking system against attacks since it can embed multiple copies of the same watermark value w into a digital object.
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paper_title: Moving steganography and steganalysis from the laboratory into the real world

paper_content:

There has been an explosion of academic literature on steganography and steganalysis in the past two decades. With a few exceptions, such papers address abstractions of the hiding and detection problems, which arguably have become disconnected from the real world. Most published results, including by the authors of this paper, apply "in laboratory conditions" and some are heavily hedged by assumptions and caveats; significant challenges remain unsolved in order to implement good steganography and steganalysis in practice. This position paper sets out some of the important questions which have been left unanswered, as well as highlighting some that have already been addressed successfully, for steganography and steganalysis to be used in the real world.
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paper_title: The First 50 Years of Electronic Watermarking

paper_content:

Electronic watermarking can be traced back as far as 1954. The last 10 years has seen considerable interest in digital watermarking, due, in large part, to concerns about illegal piracy of copyrighted content. In this paper, we consider the following questions: is the interest warranted? What are the commercial applications of the technology? What scientific progress has been made in the last 10 years? What are the most exciting areas for research? And where might the next 10 years take us? In our opinion, the interest in watermarking is appropriate. However, we expect that copyright applications will be overshadowed by applications such as broadcast monitoring, authentication, and tracking content distributed within corporations. We further see a variety of applications emerging that add value to media, such as annotation and linking content to the Web. These latter applications may turn out to be the most compelling. Considerable progress has been made toward enabling these applications--perceptual modelling, security threats and countermeasures, and the development of a bag of tricks for efficient implementations. Further progress is needed in methods for handling geometric and temporal distortions. We expect other exciting developments to arise from research in informed watermarking.
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paper_title: Rights protection for discrete numeric streams

paper_content:

Today's world of increasingly dynamic environments naturally results in more and more data being available as fast streams. Applications such as stock market analysis, environmental sensing, Web clicks, and intrusion detection are just a few of the examples where valuable data is streamed. Often, streaming information is offered on the basis of a nonexclusive, single-use customer license. One major concern, especially given the digital nature of the valuable stream, is the ability to easily record and potentially "replay" parts of it in the future. If there is value associated with such future replays, it could constitute enough incentive for a malicious customer (Mallory) to record and duplicate data segments, subsequently reselling them for profit. Being able to protect against such infringements becomes a necessity. In this work, we introduce the issue of rights protection for discrete streaming data through watermarking. This is a novel problem with many associated challenges including: operating in a finite window, single-pass, (possibly) high-speed streaming model, and surviving natural domain specific transforms and attacks (e.g., extreme sparse sampling and summarizations), while at the same time keeping data alterations within allowable bounds. We propose a solution and analyze its resilience to various types of attacks as well as some of the important expected domain-specific transforms, such as sampling and summarization. We implement a proof of concept software (wms.*) and perform experiments on real sensor data from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility at the University of Hawaii, to assess encoding resilience levels in practice. Our solution proves to be well suited for this new domain. For example, we can recover an over 97 percent confidence watermark from a highly down-sampled (e.g., less than 8 percent) stream or survive stream summarization (e.g., 20 percent) and random alteration attacks with very high confidence levels, often above 99 percent.
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paper_title: An Optimal Detector Structure for the Fourier Descriptors Domain Watermarking of 2D Vector Graphics

paper_content:

Polygonal lines constitute a key graphical primitive in 2D vector graphics data. Thus, the ability to apply a digital watermark to such an entity would enable the watermarking of cartoons, drawings, and geographical information systems (GIS) data in vector graphics format. This paper builds on and extends an existing algorithm that achieves polygonal line watermarking by modifying the Fourier descriptors magnitude in an imperceptible way. Watermarks embedded by this technique can be detected in rotated, translated, scaled, or reflected polygonal lines. The detection of such watermarks had been previously carried out through a correlator detector. In this paper, analysis of the statistics of the Fourier descriptors is exploited to devise an optimal blind detector. Furthermore, the problem of watermarking multiple lines, as well as other implementation issues are being addressed. Experimental results verify the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed method.
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paper_title: Reversible fragile watermarking for 2-D vector map authentication with localization

paper_content:

A 2-D vector map is very important data in the surveying and mapping fields. It is considered to be content for which verification of integrity and authenticity are urgently required. Several reversible fragile watermarking schemes based on lossless compression presented in the literature guarantee neither exact recovery of the original content nor good tamper localization performance. Using a novel marking technique and a reversible data-hiding method, we propose a scheme that detects and locates malicious attacks with high accuracy while ensuring exact recovery of the original content. In particular, we propose calculating watermarks for each spatial feature group, embedding the watermark in a reversible manner and marking the original location of each feature using interpolated vertices. While the mark of each feature ensures superior accuracy of tamper localization, the reversible data-hiding method provides exact recovery of the original content. Moreover, this paper discusses selecting appropriate embedding parameters to achieve good performance in terms of the tamper localization ability, invisibility, authentication power and security. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme could detect and locate malicious attacks such as vertex/feature modification, vertex addition/deletion, and feature addition/deletion.
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paper_title: Watermarking geographical data on spatial topological relations

paper_content:

Geographical data is of great value for data producers. How to protect copyright of geographical data effectively using digital watermarking is a hot research issue. In this paper, spatial topological relation existing between polygons is chosen as cover data, and watermark is embedded by slightly modifying the metric measure of spatial topological relation, and some geographical objects are scaled to derive the watermarked data. Global Main Scaling Distance is introduced to measure the distortions caused by watermark embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a good robustness against geometrical attacks, simplification, interpolation and noise addition attacks, and preserves shape of the watermarked geographical objects. Furthermore, a good tradeoff between robustness and fidelity is acquired in the proposed algorithm.
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paper_title: Vector watermarking scheme for GIS vector map management

paper_content:

A geographical information services (GIS) can be provided on the basis of a digital map, which is the fundamental form of representation of data in a GIS. Because the process of producing a digital map is considerably complex and the maintenance of a digital map requires substantial monetary and human resources, a digital map is very valuable and requires copyright protection. A digital map consists of a number of layers that are categorized in terms of topographical features and landmarks. Therefore, any unauthorized person can forge either an entire digital map or the feature layers of the map. In this paper, we present a robust and invisible watermarking scheme based on polylines and polygons for the copyright protection of a GIS digital map. The proposed scheme clusters all polylines and polygons in the feature layers of the map on the basis of the polyline length and the polygon area. And then a watermark is embedded in GIS vector data on the basis of the distribution of polyline length and polygon area in each group by moving all vertices in polylines and polygons within a specified tolerance. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme is more robust against geometric attacks, such as rotation, scaling, and translation (RST) transformations, data addition, cropping, breaking, and filleting attacks, and layer attacks with rearrangement and cropping, when compared with conventional schemes. Moreover, the scheme also satisfies data position accuracy.
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paper_title: Hello World : Introducing Spatial Data

paper_content:

Spatial and spatio-temporal data are everywhere. Besides those we collect ourselves (‘is it raining?’), they confront us on television, in newspapers, on route planners, on computer screens, on mobile devices, and on plain paper maps. Making a map that is suited to its purpose and does not distort the underlying data unnecessarily is however not easy. Beyond creating and viewing maps, spatial data analysis is concerned with questions not directly answered by looking at the data themselves. These questions refer to hypothetical processes that generate the observed data. Statistical inference for such spatial processes is often challenging, but is necessary when we try to draw conclusions about questions that interest us.
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paper_title: A high capacity reversible data hiding method for 2D vector maps based on virtual coordinates

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a high capacity reversible data hiding method for 2D vector maps based on virtual coordinates. In the scheme, we calculate two virtual coordinates for each eligible coordinate, and embed c (c>=1) secret bits by modifying the state value of the interval which is created by the two corresponding virtual coordinates. Since nearly every coordinate can carry c bits, the data capacity in bits achieves nearly 2c times the number of vertices in the vector map. In addition, to resist content preserving operations, the vertex traversing order is defined. Experimental results and analysis show that the proposed method provides good reversibility, invisibility and computational complexity and is robust against the feature rearrangement and vertex reversing attacks for polylines and polygons.
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paper_title: A key points-based blind watermarking approach for vector geo-spatial data

paper_content:

Abstract This paper presents a blind watermarking approach to protecting vector geo-spatial data from illegal use. By taking into account usability, invisibility, robustness, and blindness, the approach firstly determines three feature layers of the geo-spatial data and selects the key points from each layer as watermark embedding positions. Then it shuffles the watermark and embeds it in the least significant bits (LSBs) of the coordinates of the key points. A similar process for selecting the feature layers and the key points in the watermark embedding process is carried out to detect the watermark followed by obtaining the embedded watermark from the LSBs of the coordinates of the key points. Finally, the similarity degrees of three versions of the watermark from three feature layers are calculated to check if the data contains the watermark. Our experiments show that the method is rarely affected by data format change, random noise, similarity transformation of the data, and data editing.
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paper_title: Data hiding in curves with application to fingerprinting maps

paper_content:

This paper presents a new data hiding method for curves. The proposed algorithm parameterizes a curve using the B-spline model and adds a spread spectrum sequence to the coordinates of the B-spline control points. In order to achieve robust fingerprint detection, an iterative alignment-minimization algorithm is proposed to perform curve registration and to deal with the nonuniqueness of B-spline control points. Through experiments, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed data-hiding algorithm against various attacks, such as collusion, cropping, geometric transformations, vector/raster-raster/vector conversions, printing-and-scanning, and some of their combinations. We also show the feasibility of our method for fingerprinting topographic maps as well as writings and drawings.
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paper_title: A Shape-Based Vector Watermark for Digital Mapping

paper_content:

Digital vector maps are an expensive commodity. Like any digital data, they are also very easy to copy. Piracy (or unauthorised reselling) of maps will become increasingly common in the future. This project looks at embedding a hidden message or watermark in a digital map so that its original authorship can be ascertained. This information enables a 3rd party to verify a seller's rights to the map and aid in the resolution of copyright disputes. Some other vector watermarking schemes, look at vector maps as a cloud of coordinates, to be perturbed in some way that is independent of actual usage. These papers generally do not discuss how large a subset of the map is needed to reliably retain the watermark. Instead, we concentrate on watermarking map feature lines, so that feature extraction from a watermarked vector map may not necessarily compromise watermark integrity.
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paper_title: Rights protection of trajectory datasets with nearest-neighbor preservation

paper_content:

Companies frequently outsource datasets to mining firms, and academic institutions create repositories or share datasets in the interest of promoting research collaboration. Still, many practitioners have reservations about sharing or outsourcing datasets, primarily because of fear of losing the principal rights over the dataset. This work presents a way of convincingly claiming ownership rights over a trajectory dataset, without, at the same time, destroying the salient dataset characteristics, which are important for accurate search operations and data-mining tasks. The digital watermarking methodology that we present distorts imperceptibly a collection of sequences, effectively embedding a secret key, while retaining as well as possible the neighborhood of each object, which is vital for operations such as similarity search, classification, or clustering. A key contribution in this methodology is a technique for discovering the maximum distortion that still maintains such desirable properties. We demonstrate both analytically and empirically that the proposed dataset marking techniques can withstand a number of attacks (such a translation, rotation, noise addition, etc) and therefore can provide a robust framework for facilitating the secure dissemination of trajectory datasets.
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paper_title: SWIRL: A Scalable Watermark to Detect Correlated Network Flows

paper_content:

Flow watermarks are active traffic analysis techniques that help establish a causal connection between two network flows by content-independent manipulations, e.g., altering packet timings. Watermarks provide a much more scalable approach for flow correlation than passive traffic analysis. Previous designs of scalable watermarks, however, were subject to multi-flow attacks. They also introduced delays too large to be used in most environments. We design SWIRL, a Scalable Watermark that is Invisible and Resilient to packet Losses. SWIRL is the first watermark that is practical to use for large-scale traffic analysis. SWIRL uses a flow-dependent approach to resist multi-flow attacks, marking each flow with a different pattern. SWIRL is robust to packet losses and network jitter, yet it introduces only small delays that are invisible to both benign users and determined adversaries. We analyze the performance of SWIRL both analytically and on the PlanetLab testbed, demonstrating very low error rates. We consider applications of SWIRL to stepping stone detection and linking anonymous communication. We also propose a novel application of watermarks to defend against congestion attacks on Tor.
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paper_title: A Cross-Layer Watermarking-Based Mechanism for Data Aggregation Integrity in Heterogeneous WSNs

paper_content:

Ensuring data aggregation integrity introduces new challenges for data aggregation security protocols in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an efficient watermarking based security strategy to ensure data aggregation integrity in heterogeneous WSNs. The proposed security scheme suggests a new fragile watermarking technique based on a dynamic embedding mechanism and a cross-layer approach. Compared to the existing heterogeneous security solutions, our system respects the resources limitations of the homogenous sensor nodes and optimizes the data aggregation process on the heterogeneous aggregation nodes. The proposal is evaluated using simulation.
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paper_title: Secure Provenance Transmission for Streaming Data

paper_content:

Many application domains, such as real-time financial analysis, e-healthcare systems, sensor networks, are characterized by continuous data streaming from multiple sources and through intermediate processing by multiple aggregators. Keeping track of data provenance in such highly dynamic context is an important requirement, since data provenance is a key factor in assessing data trustworthiness which is crucial for many applications. Provenance management for streaming data requires addressing several challenges, including the assurance of high processing throughput, low bandwidth consumption, storage efficiency and secure transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to securely transmit provenance for streaming data (focusing on sensor network) by embedding provenance into the interpacket timing domain while addressing the above mentioned issues. As provenance is hidden in another host-medium, our solution can be conceptualized as watermarking technique. However, unlike traditional watermarking approaches, we embed provenance over the interpacket delays (IPDs) rather than in the sensor data themselves, hence avoiding the problem of data degradation due to watermarking. Provenance is extracted by the data receiver utilizing an optimal threshold-based mechanism which minimizes the probability of provenance decoding errors. The resiliency of the scheme against outside and inside attackers is established through an extensive security analysis. Experiments show that our technique can recover provenance up to a certain level against perturbations to inter-packet timing characteristics.
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paper_title: RAINBOW: A Robust And Invisible Non-Blind Watermark for Network Flows

paper_content:

Linking network flows is an important problem in intrusion detection as well as anonymity. Passive traffic analysis can link flows but requires long periods of observation to reduce errors. Watermarking techniques allow for better precision and blind detection, but they do so by introducing significant delays to the traffic flow, enabling attacks that detect and remove the mark, while at the same time slowing down legitimate traffic. We propose a new, non-blind watermarking scheme called RAINBOW that is able to use delays hundreds of times smaller than existing watermarks by eliminating the interference caused by the flow in the blind case. As a result, our watermark is invisible to detection, as confirmed by experiments using information-theoretic detection tools. We analyze the error rates of our scheme based on a mathematical model of network traffic and jitter. We also validate the analysis using an implementation running on PlanetLab. We find that our scheme generates orders of magnitudes lower rates of false errors than passive traffic analysis, while using only a few hundred observed packets. We also extend our scheme so that it is robust to packet drops and repacketization and show that flows can still be reliably linked, though at the cost of somewhat longer observation periods.
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paper_title: CHAINING WATERMARKS FOR DETECTING MALICIOUS MODIFICATIONS TO STREAMING DATA

paper_content:

Abstract Authenticating streaming data is a very important research area due to its wide range of applications. Previous technologies mainly focused on authenticating data packets at the IP layer and ensuring the robustness of the verification. These schemes usually incur large communications overhead, which is not desirable in applications with limited bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel fragile watermarking algorithm which verifies the integrity of streaming data at the application layer. The data are divided into groups based on synchronization points, so each group can be synchronized and any modifications made to one group only affect up to two groups. A unique watermark is embedded directly into each group to save communications bandwidth. The embedded watermark can detect as well as locate any modifications made to a data stream. To ensure the completeness of the data stream, watermarks are chained across groups so that no matter how many data are deleted, these deletions can be correctly detected. Security analysis and experimental results show that the proposed scheme can efficiently detect and locate modifications and ensure the completeness of data streams.
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paper_title: A digital watermarking approach to secure and precise range query processing in sensor networks

paper_content:

Two-tiered wireless sensor networks offer good scalability, efficient power usage, and space saving. However, storage nodes are more attractive to attackers than sensors because they store sensor collected data and processing sink issued queries. A compromised storage node not only reveals sensor collected data, but also may reply incomplete or wrong query results. In this paper, we propose QuerySec, a protocol that enables storage nodes to process queries correctly while prevents them from revealing both data from sensors and queries from the sink. To protect privacy, we propose an order preserving function-based scheme to encode both sensor collected data and sink issued queries, which allows storage nodes to process queries correctly without knowing the actual values of both data and queries. To preserve integrity, we proposed a link watermarking scheme, where data items are formed into a link by the watermarks embedded in them so that any deletion in query results can be detected.
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paper_title: Self-identifying sensor data

paper_content:

Public-use sensor datasets are a useful scientific resource with the unfortunate feature that their provenance is easily disconnected from their content. To address this we introduce a technique to directly associate provenance information with sensor datasets. Our technique is similar to traditional watermarking but is intended for application to unstructured datasets. Our approach is potentially imperceptible given sufficient margins of error in datasets, and is robust to a number of benign but likely transformations including truncation, rounding, bit-flipping, sampling, and reordering. We provide algorithms for both one-bit and blind mark checking. Our algorithms are probabilistic in nature and are characterized by a combinatorial analysis.
---
paper_title: Rights protection for discrete numeric streams

paper_content:

Today's world of increasingly dynamic environments naturally results in more and more data being available as fast streams. Applications such as stock market analysis, environmental sensing, Web clicks, and intrusion detection are just a few of the examples where valuable data is streamed. Often, streaming information is offered on the basis of a nonexclusive, single-use customer license. One major concern, especially given the digital nature of the valuable stream, is the ability to easily record and potentially "replay" parts of it in the future. If there is value associated with such future replays, it could constitute enough incentive for a malicious customer (Mallory) to record and duplicate data segments, subsequently reselling them for profit. Being able to protect against such infringements becomes a necessity. In this work, we introduce the issue of rights protection for discrete streaming data through watermarking. This is a novel problem with many associated challenges including: operating in a finite window, single-pass, (possibly) high-speed streaming model, and surviving natural domain specific transforms and attacks (e.g., extreme sparse sampling and summarizations), while at the same time keeping data alterations within allowable bounds. We propose a solution and analyze its resilience to various types of attacks as well as some of the important expected domain-specific transforms, such as sampling and summarization. We implement a proof of concept software (wms.*) and perform experiments on real sensor data from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility at the University of Hawaii, to assess encoding resilience levels in practice. Our solution proves to be well suited for this new domain. For example, we can recover an over 97 percent confidence watermark from a highly down-sampled (e.g., less than 8 percent) stream or survive stream summarization (e.g., 20 percent) and random alteration attacks with very high confidence levels, often above 99 percent.
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paper_title: Hiding data in compressive sensed measurements : A conditionally reversible data hiding scheme for compressively sensed measurements

paper_content:

Most of the real-world signals we encounter in real-life applications have low information content. In other words, these signals can be well approximated by sparse signals in a proper basis. Compressive sensing framework uses this fact and attempts to represent signals by using far fewer measurements as compared to conventional acquisition systems. While the CS acquisition is linear, the reconstruction of the signal from its sparse samples is nonlinear and complex. The sparse nature of the signal allows enough room for some additional data sequence to be inserted and exactly recovered along with the reconstructed signal. In this study, we propose to linearly embed and hide data in compressively sensed signals and nonlinearly reconstruct both of them using a deflationary approach. We investigate the embedding capacity as a function of signal sparsity and signal compression, as well as the noise sensitivity of the proposed algorithm.
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paper_title: Hardware assisted watermarking for multimedia

paper_content:

Digital media offer several distinct advantages over analog media, such as high quality, ease of editing, and ease of processing operations such as compression and high fidelity copying. Digital data is commonly available through digital TV broadcast, CD, DVD, and computing devices such as personal computers. The ease by which a digital media object can be duplicated and distributed has led to the need for effective digital rights management tools. Digital watermarking is one such tool. Watermarking is the process of embedding extra data called a watermark into a multimedia object, like image, audio, or video, such that the watermark can later be detected or extracted in order to make an assertion regarding the object. During the last decade, numerous software based watermarking schemes have appeared in the literature and watermarking research has attained a certain degree of maturity. But hardware based watermarking systems have evolved more recently only and they are still at their infancy. The goal of hardware assisted watermarking is to achieve low power usage, real-time performance, reliability, and ease of integration with existing consumer electronic devices. In this paper, we survey the hardware assisted solutions proposed in the literature for watermarking of multimedia objects. The survey is preceded by an introduction to the background issues involved in digital watermarking.
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paper_title: Query-preserving watermarking of relational databases and XML documents

paper_content:

Watermarking allows robust and unobtrusive insertion of information in a digital document. Very recently, techniques have been proposed for watermarking relational databases or XML documents, where information insertion must preserve a specific measure on data (e.g. mean and variance of numerical attributes.)In this paper we investigate the problem of watermarking databases or XML while preserving a set of parametric queries in a specified language, up to an acceptable distortion.We first observe that unrestricted databases can not be watermarked while preserving trivial parametric queries. We then exhibit query languages and classes of structures that allow guaranteed watermarking capacity, namely 1) local query languages on structures with bounded degree Gaifman graph, and 2) monadic second-order queries on trees or tree-like structures. We relate these results to an important topic in computational learning theory, the VC-dimension. We finally consider incremental aspects of query-preserving watermarking.
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paper_title: Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data

paper_content:

Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data isgeared towards CIOs, CEOs, presidents, and IT professionals. At a high level, the book makes a compelling business case for that which we are calling Big Data. Simon provides commonsense advice for organizations looking to make sense out of the information streaming at us with unprecedented volume, velocity, and variety. Think big.
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paper_title: Watermarking at point of origin

paper_content:

We describe a proposed scheme for watermarking images or video at the camera. This addresses the issue of image security between the point of origin and the point of distribution. The scheme is expected to find application in the security industry, where proof of tampering is important and in commercial photography, where breach of copyright is important.
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paper_title: A Survey on Trust Management for Internet of Things

paper_content:

Internet of Things (IoT) is going to create a world where physical objects are seamlessly integrated into information networks in order to provide advanced and intelligent services for human-beings. Trust management plays an important role in IoT for reliable data fusion and mining, qualified services with context-awareness, and enhanced user privacy and information security. It helps people overcome perceptions of uncertainty and risk and engages in user acceptance and consumption on IoT services and applications. However, current literature still lacks a comprehensive study on trust management in IoT. In this paper, we investigate the properties of trust, propose objectives of IoT trust management, and provide a survey on the current literature advances towards trustworthy IoT. Furthermore, we discuss unsolved issues, specify research challenges and indicate future research trends by proposing a research model for holistic trust management in IoT.
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paper_title: New optimal low correlation sequences for wireless communications

paper_content:

This paper presents three new sets of frequency hopping sequences, which are converted into sequences for CDMA. One of the CDMA sequence families is optimal with respect to the Welch bound, and two are nearly optimal. Our sequences are available for more lengths, and have much higher linear complexity than other CDMA sequences. They have a similar structure to the small Kasami set, but are balanced. The CDMA sequences are constructed using a composition method, which combines new shift sequences with pseudonoise columns to form an array. The array dimensions are relatively prime, so it is unfolded using the Chinese Remainder Theorem. ::: ::: Each of our constructions gives rise to two additional families with larger family sizes but worse correlation as explained in Section 4.2.
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paper_title: BCH coding and intelligent watermark embedding: Employing both frequency and strength selection

paper_content:

This paper presents a novel approach of adaptive visual tuning of a watermark in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain. The proposed approach intelligently selects appropriate frequency bands as well as optimal strength of alteration. Genetic Programming (GP) is applied to structure the watermark by exploiting both the characteristics of human visual system and information pertaining to a cascade of conceivable attacks. The developed visual tuning expressions are dependent on frequency and luminance sensitivities, and contrast masking. To further enhance robustness, spread spectrum based watermarking and Bose-Chadhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) coding is employed. The combination of spread spectrum sequence, BCH coding and GP based non-linear structuring makes it extremely difficult for an attacker to gain information about the secret knowledge of the watermarking system. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed approach against the existing approaches. Especially, the margin of improvement in robustness will be of high importance in medical and context aware related applications of watermarking.
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paper_title: Self-identifying sensor data

paper_content:

Public-use sensor datasets are a useful scientific resource with the unfortunate feature that their provenance is easily disconnected from their content. To address this we introduce a technique to directly associate provenance information with sensor datasets. Our technique is similar to traditional watermarking but is intended for application to unstructured datasets. Our approach is potentially imperceptible given sufficient margins of error in datasets, and is robust to a number of benign but likely transformations including truncation, rounding, bit-flipping, sampling, and reordering. We provide algorithms for both one-bit and blind mark checking. Our algorithms are probabilistic in nature and are characterized by a combinatorial analysis.
---
paper_title: The Watermark Evaluation Testbed (WET)

paper_content:

While digital watermarking has received much attention within the academic community and private sector in recent years, it is still a relatively young technology. As such there are few widely accepted benchmarks that can be used to validate the performance claims asserted by members of the research community. This lack of a universally adopted benchmark has hindered research and created confusion within the general public. To facilitate the development of a universally adopted benchmark, we are developing at Purdue University a web-based system that will allow users to evaluate the performance of watermarking techniques. This system consists of reference software that includes both watermark embedders and watermark detectors, attack scenarios, evaluation modules and a large image database. The ultimate goal of the current work is to develop a platform that one can use to test the performance of watermarking methods and obtain fair, reproducible comparisons of the results. We feel that this work will greatly stimulate new research in watermarking and data hiding by allowing one to demonstrate how new techniques are moving forward the state of the art. We will refer to this system as the Watermark Evaluation Testbed or WET.
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paper_title: Fast n-point Correlation Function Approximation with Recursive Convolution for Scalar Fields

paper_content:

In astrophysics, n-point Correlation Function (n-PCF) is an important tool for computation and analysis, but its algorithmic complex has long been a notorious problem. In this paper we are going to propose two algorithms that are easy to be parallized to compute the n-PCF problem efficiently. The algorithms are based on the definition of recursive convolution for scalar fields (RCSF), and it can be computed using varous fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithms in literature. Compared to traditional ways of dealing with this problem, our method is most efficient, for that it can achieve results with point sets as large as 1 billion in less than 1 minute. Moreover, the algorithms are intrinsically appropriate to be used on parallel computing environments such as computer clusters, multi-CPU/GPU super-computers, MapReduce and etc. Better computing environments can deal with better accuracy and time requirements.
---
paper_title: Rights protection for discrete numeric streams

paper_content:

Today's world of increasingly dynamic environments naturally results in more and more data being available as fast streams. Applications such as stock market analysis, environmental sensing, Web clicks, and intrusion detection are just a few of the examples where valuable data is streamed. Often, streaming information is offered on the basis of a nonexclusive, single-use customer license. One major concern, especially given the digital nature of the valuable stream, is the ability to easily record and potentially "replay" parts of it in the future. If there is value associated with such future replays, it could constitute enough incentive for a malicious customer (Mallory) to record and duplicate data segments, subsequently reselling them for profit. Being able to protect against such infringements becomes a necessity. In this work, we introduce the issue of rights protection for discrete streaming data through watermarking. This is a novel problem with many associated challenges including: operating in a finite window, single-pass, (possibly) high-speed streaming model, and surviving natural domain specific transforms and attacks (e.g., extreme sparse sampling and summarizations), while at the same time keeping data alterations within allowable bounds. We propose a solution and analyze its resilience to various types of attacks as well as some of the important expected domain-specific transforms, such as sampling and summarization. We implement a proof of concept software (wms.*) and perform experiments on real sensor data from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility at the University of Hawaii, to assess encoding resilience levels in practice. Our solution proves to be well suited for this new domain. For example, we can recover an over 97 percent confidence watermark from a highly down-sampled (e.g., less than 8 percent) stream or survive stream summarization (e.g., 20 percent) and random alteration attacks with very high confidence levels, often above 99 percent.
---
paper_title: A Unique Watermark for Every Image

paper_content:

We address image security issues by proposing a scheme for watermarking images or video at the camera. Each watermark is unique and identifies the owner, camera, and frame number. Application areas include the security industry (for proof of tampering) and commercial photography (for copyright protection).
---

Title: On the Properties of Non-Media Digital Watermarking: A Review of State of the Art Techniques

Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: Introduce the concept of digital watermarking, its historical context, and its traditional applications in multimedia. Discuss the complexities and challenges unique to watermarking non-media data types.

Section 2: BACKGROUND
Description 2: Provide a historical overview of digital watermarking. Explain information hiding techniques, including steganography and encryption, and how they relate to digital watermarking. Discuss general components of a watermarking system.

Section 3: DATA TAXONOMY
Description 3: Outline the various types of non-media data including sequence data, graph-structured data, spatial data, spatiotemporal data, and data streams. Introduce the importance of understanding data characteristics for determining suitable watermarking techniques.

Section 4: FOUR PROPERTIES OF NON-MEDIA WATERMARKING
Description 4: Examine the main properties of watermarking systems—Invisibility, Robustness, Capacity, and Security—specifically in the context of non-media data. Discuss the challenges and considerations for each property.

Section 5: NON-MEDIA DATA HIDING APPLICATIONS
Description 5: Review recent applications of digital watermarking for non-media data, including sensor networks, healthcare systems, relational databases, cloud computing, network flow watermarking, and financial systems. Discuss specific techniques and their real-world implications.

Section 6: NON-MEDIA WATERMARKING TAXONOMY
Description 6: Provide a detailed analysis of digital watermarking techniques for various complex data types mentioned in the data taxonomy. Examine the techniques concerning Invisibility, Robustness, Capacity, and Security.

Section 7: BIG DATA WATERMARKING
Description 7: Discuss the challenges and requirements of watermarking in the context of big data, including addressing the 5V's: Volume, Variety, Velocity, Veracity, and Value. Explore potential directions for future research adapting to the big data environment.

Section 8: CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
Description 8: Summarize the key findings and insights from the review. Reflect on the maturity of the research domain and suggest future research directions, emphasizing the integration of watermarking techniques within the IoT and big data contexts.