Integrity verification for XML data

The success of the Internet has made the communication very easy between parties and XML is one of the most used standard for information representation and exchange. A huge amount of data is crossing the Internet on the daily basis. Since the Internet is an unreliable network, XML data can be easily captured and tampered by unauthorized users. This study is proposing a scheme that uses fragile watermarking to detect and localize any modification made to an XML data. This scheme is distortion free since it doesn't introduce any distortion to the XML data. This scheme uses an algorithm that distributes elements of the XML data into groups in a secure manner according to certain parameters. The watermark is verified without the need to have the initial XML data, and also, the embedding and the verification process in each group are independent. Experimental results and security analysis show that the chance to detect and locate change in the XML data is very high.