Watermarking security part I: theory

François Cayre (1) , Caroline Fontaine (2) , Teddy Furon (1)

1 TEMICS - Digital image processing, modeling and communication
2 LIFL - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille

This article proposes a theory of watermarking security based on a cryptanalysis point of view. The main idea is that information about the secret key leaks from the observations, for instance watermarked pieces of content, available to the opponent. Tools from information theory (Shannon's mutual information and Fisher's information matrix) can measure this leakage of information. The security level is then defined as the number of observations the attacker needs to successfully estimate the secret key. This theory is applied to common watermarking methods: the substitutive scheme and spread spectrum based techniques. Their security levels are calculated against three kinds of attack.

Domains: Multimedia [cs.MM]

François Cayre, Caroline Fontaine, Teddy Furon. Watermarking security part I: theory. Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents VII, Jan 2005, San Jose, CA, USA, United States. pp.746--757. ⟨inria-00083329⟩