Cryptanalysis of Barni et al. Watermarking Scheme

In this paper, we analyze a wavelet based watermarking scheme proposed by Barni et al in 2001. The said scheme modifies high frequency wavelet coefficients to embed a watermark in an image. The scheme employs well known HVS model during embedding to embed the watermark in a perceptually transparent manner. Here we present a successful cryptanalysis of the scheme using single watermarked copy. In the process of cryptanalysis, we recover the watermark signal from the marked image and the attack is similar to cryptographic key recovery attack. Furthermore, we not only successfully recover the secret watermark signal from the attacked image, but also we are able to remove the watermark. This raises a serious question about the security and usability of the watermarking scheme in any practical system.

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