A blind reversible method for watermarking relational databases based on a time-stamping protocol

Digital watermarking technology has been adopted lately as an effective solution to protecting the copyright of digital assets from illicit copying. Reversible watermark, which is also called invertible watermark, or erasable watermark, helps to recover back the original data after the content has been authenticated. Such reversibility is highly desired in some sensitive database applications, e.g. in military and medical data. Permanent distortion is one of the main drawbacks of the entire irreversible relational database watermarking schemes. In this paper, we design an authentication protocol based on an efficient time-stamp protocol, and we propose a blind reversible watermarking method that ensures ownership protection in the field of relational database watermarking. Whereas previous techniques have been mainly concerned with introducing permanent errors into the original data, our approach ensures one hundred percent recovery of the original database relation after the owner-specific watermark has been detected and authenticated. In the proposed watermarking method, we utilize a reversible data-embedding technique called prediction-error expansion on integers to achieve reversibility. The detection of the watermark can be completed successfully even when 95% of a watermarked relation tuples are deleted. Our extensive analysis shows that the proposed scheme is robust against various forms of database attacks, including adding, deleting, shuffling or modifying tuples or attributes. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.