Watermarking protocol for web context

Digital watermarking is considered to be a main technology for the copyright protection of multimedia digital content distributed on the Internet. However, watermarking procedures can effectively support copyright protection processes only if they are applied by employing specific watermarking protocols, which define the scheme of the interactions that have to take place among the entities involved in the content protection and web-based distribution. To this end, a number of current watermarking protocols can attain important achievements, such as the correct authentication of buyers without exposing their identities during web transactions and the capability of resorting to trusted watermark certification authorities to ensure a copyright protection process that is able to correctly take into account the rights of both buyers and sellers. However, these protocols are often not suitable for web context, where buyers are usually neither provided with digital certificates issued by trusted certification authorities nor able to autonomously perform complex security actions to purchase digital content distributed by web-based content providers. This paper presents an improved version of a web-oriented and interactive anonymous buyer-seller watermarking protocol previously presented by the author. The protocol overcomes the drawbacks affecting relevant protocols existing in literature, and is based on a design approach that makes it suitable for web contexts.