WATERMARKING RELATIONAL DATABASES USING OPTIMIZATION-BASED TECHNIQUES

abstract:
Proving ownerships rights on outsourced relational database is a crucial issue in today's 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 discus efficient techniques to solve the optimization problem and to handle the onstraints. Our watermarking technique is resilient to watermark synchronization errors because it uses a partioning approach that does not require marker tuple. 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