Watermarking Relational Databases Using Optimization-Based Techniques

Proving ownership rights on outsourced relational databases is a crucial issue in today internet-based application environments 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 exper...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TKDE
• Authors: Mohamed Shehab, Elisa Bertino, Arif Ghafoor
• Keywords: Optimization Problem, Relational Databases, Robust Imperceptible Watermark, TKDE 2008