A robust watermarking technique for copyright protection for relational databases

Abstract

Internet based digitization has been of rapid increase in the usage of database applications at an enormous rate in recent times. It is very difficult to secure the ownership of digital assets because all the data on the internet are available everywhere almost free of cost and anybody can access such data and claim their ownership. In current digital scenario not only images, videos, and audio are in digital form. Databases are also digitized in different models and used as a service in database applications, including areas such as finance, multimedia, personnel, etc. A huge amount of confidential and sensitive data which are available publically facing a variety of threats like illegal copying, illegal redistribution, tampering, forgery and authentication. Authenticity, integrity, confidentiality and copyright protection are most important security issues to be addressed with most importance. Copyright management is a serious issue in database applications because it is much easier for others to download and manipulate copyrighted databases from the Internet and later re-use without any control. In this paper we proposed a robust watermarking scheme for copyright protection for relational databases, which protects the copy right information of the database even if the attacker tampers the data by changing the attribute values or reordering the tuples of the database. The proposed watermarking technique is robust since the watermark will not be lost even though the attacker tampers the data. The experiments show that the new method is efficient as well as effective for maintaining copy right information there by ensuring right protection to relational databases.