Analyses on Digital Watermarking Techniques for Web Databases

IJSTE - International Journal of Science Technology & Engineering | Volume 4 | Issue 6 | December 2017 ISSN (online): 2349-784X

Analyses on Digital Watermarking Techniques For Web Databases Dr. Vidhi Khanduja Department of Computer Engineering SAL Educational Campus, Gujrat, India

Abstract The security of databases have become a major concern today. Database owners are making their content publically available and the risk of occurrence of ownership disputes, tampering of databases etc. have increased manifolds. In this manuscript, the various processes to enhance the watermarking techniques are analysed. This includes: increasing the degree of robustness, targeting different kinds of web databases and utilizing watermark to address authentication and information recovery. The degree of robustness can be significantly increased by employing partitioning, attribute normalization, sorting of attributes, using data rich object attributes, and lowering false hit rate and false miss rate of the proposed watermarking technique.

Keywords: Watermarking Databases, Robust Watermarking, Technological Protection Measure, Information Security ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I.

INTRODUCTION

With the increase in ICT, the value of data has increased manifolds. The data is compiled and then sold in market at high prices.

Thus, the security of such databases have become major concern today. Database owners are making their content publically available and the risk of occurrence of ownership disputes, tampering of databases etc. have increased manifolds. Digital Watermarking, a technological protective measure is a technique that is well known, well researched and very well applied. The process of placing the marks into our original work is referred as digital watermarking [1]. These marks are placed such that they cannot be identified by an intruder and once placed, they remain within our database forever and hence protect it. We broadly classify watermarking techniques into two categories: Robust and Fragile. Robust watermarking techniques provide protection against ownership disputes. Fragile watermarking techniques aims to detect temperedness in database. Any digital watermarking process comprises of creating a watermark first and then securely embedding it into the database. This watermark become the part of the database and travels along with it. Robust watermarking techniques conceals owner or database information within a watermark while watermark is created from the values/data of the database in case of fragile watermarking. In this manuscript, the focus is on robust watermarking techniques. The prepared watermark can be embedded into numeric [2-4] or text [5-6] or categorical [7-8] or image type [9] of attributes. This manuscript mainly focusses on the processes to improve the robustness of the robust watermarking techniques.

Section 2 enumerates various parameters for watermarking databases. In section 3, these parameters are discussed to improve the performance of digital watermarking techniques. Section 4 concludes the work.

Fig. 1: Watermarking Databases

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Analyses on Digital Watermarking Techniques For Web Databases (IJSTE/ Volume 4 / Issue 6 / 008)

II. PARAMETERS OF A ROBUST WATERMARKING TECHNIQUES Any watermarking technique must follow certain guidelines to make the technique effective. The following are the parameters which the watermarking technique must implement in the proposed scheme: 1) Watermarking technique should be secure.

2) Watermarking technique should be designed such that it should be resilient towards various malicious attacks.

3) Watermarking technique should induce minimum distortions.

4) Watermarking technique should not take more time to embed and extract the watermark.

5) Watermarking technique should not be specific to a particular type of database. Any database which is available on the web, needs protection.

6) Watermarking technique should be devised such that it can address other security aspects such as authentication of the owner of database, information recovery in case of loss of data w.r.t. databases along with the ownership protection.

III. ANALYSING WATERMARKING TECHNIQUES FOR WEB DATABASES In this section, the possible ways to achieve the above enumerated parameters of digital watermarking for web databases are analysed. The following are the possible ways to achieve a secure, reliable and fast method for proving the ownership of RDBs. To Enhance the Degree of Robustness There are watermarking techniques that improved the robustness by incorporating following features: 1) Database Partitioning: Tuples of a database are securely rearranged before embedding watermark to boost the resilience of the watermark against random tuple reordering attacks [10].

2) Normalization of attribute values: This step is necessary to defeat linear transformation attack.

3) Sorting of Attributes: Selected candidate attributes can be sorted alphabetically to defeat attribute re-ordering attack.

4) Increase in number of potential locations: Increasing number of potential locations results in expansion of bandwidth for watermark insertion. This is achieved by either altering multiple bits per attribute or selecting numerous attributes per tuple.

Additionally, the use of rich-data object attributes such as audio, video etc. to conceal watermark, increases the potential locations [10].

5) Lowering False Hit Rate (FHR): This is defined as the probability of extracting a valid watermark from a non-watermarked database. It can be lowered by selecting the appropriate watermark threshold value.

6) Lowering False Miss Rate (FMR): This is defined as the probability of not detecting the watermark from a watermarked database. FMR can be lowered by increasing the redundancy parameter.

Time Criticality For statistical based watermarking techniques, application of optimization techniques such as Pattern Search (PS), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Bacterial Foraging Algorithm (BFA) results in improvement of their performance. In [2], GA is applied to solve the watermarking problem. Later, in [11] BFA is applied for the same optimization problem. It is shown that BFA enhanced the efficiency of a statistical based watermarking technique. Authors have experimentally verified that for the framed optimization problem, BFA gives better results as compared to GA in terms of processing time as well as the optimality of results obtained.

Minimize the Distortions Embedding of watermark bits in database produces distortions in the database. The proposed technique should be such that database should be altered within usability constraints. A robust watermarking technique proposed in [8] [12], minimizes the distortions to zero level. The watermark is embedded by changing the positions of tuples within the database in a secure manner.

Targeting Different Web Databases Most of the work proposed in literature has targeted Relational Databases (RDB) addressing various security aspects; ownership proof, tamper detection, authentication and information recovery. Few have targeted NoSQL databases [13-14] such as XML, MongoDb etc. However, there are emerging DBs which require protection such as OODBs, ORDBs [15], Information Systems (IS) etc.

Handling Additional Security Aspects In [16] four security aspects were identified which need immediate protection. Watermark should be created in such a way that it should handle other security aspects along with ownership protection.

Information Recovery (IR) Watermark may preserve the information to be protected. This protected information within the watermark should be able to recover the lost data. It is found that unsupervised learning such as k-means gives a sound basis for recovering lost information due to rampant attacks in databases [17].

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Analyses on Digital Watermarking Techniques For Web Databases (IJSTE/ Volume 4 / Issue 6 / 008)

Authentication Watermark may contain the authentication details of the owner. Thus, this information travels with database and can be extracted to prove the same. Various biometric traits of the owner such as signature, voice etc. are utilized to give more effective means of authentication [18-19].

IV. CONCLUSION The domain of digital watermarking has widespread challenges, and ample research is still ongoing. The bulk of prior research focussed on robust watermarking techniques. There is a need to develop more fragile watermarking schemes for traditional databases as well as several non-structured databases that are flourishing in the web. We have analyzed the ways to enhance watermarking techniques by increasing the degree of robustness, targeting different kinds of web databases and utilizing watermark to address authentication and information recovery. Further, we conclude that the degree of robustness can be significantly increased by employing partitioning, attribute normalization, sorting of attributes before embedding, using data rich object attributes, and lowering false hit rate and false miss rate of the proposed watermarking technique.

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