Watermarking Relational Databases Using Optimization-Based Techniques

  • Authors:
  • Mohamed Shehab;Elisa Bertino;Arif Ghafoor

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Proving ownership rights on outsourced relational databases is a crucial issue in today internet-based application environment and in many content distribution applications. In this paper, we present a mechanism for proof of ownership based on the secure embedding of a robust imperceptible watermark in relational data. We formulate the watermarking of relational databases as a constrained optimization problem, and discuss efficient techniques to solve the optimization problem and to handle the constraints. Our watermarking technique is resilient to watermark synchronization errors because it uses a partitioning approach that does not require marker tuples. Our approach overcomes a major weakness in previously proposed watermarking techniques. Watermark decoding is based on a threshold-based technique characterized by an optimal threshold that minimizes the probability of decoding errors. We implemented a proof of concept implementation of our watermarking technique and showed by experimental results that our technique is resilient to tuple deletion, alteration and insertion attacks.