Subset selection approach for watermarking relational databases

Abstract

Information on the open medium like Internet is of great source of digital content. This can be copied easily, modified by the unauthorized users and shared among various unknown users of the Internet. This possesses threats in various forms to the owner of the digital information. In this paper we focus on copyright issue and propose a mechanism for proof of ownership based on the secure embedding of a robust imperceptible watermark in the relational database. It is achieved by formulating a watermarking method, which will watermark only the numeric attributes. This introduces a new way of dividing the database into different subsets and a meaningful watermark is embedded into database. Proposed watermarking technique avoids the synchronization problems and is resilient to subset selection attack, alteration attack, attribute cutting attack and subset addition attack. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.