Review on attacks, problems, and weaknesses of digital watermarking and the pixel reallocation attack

Watermark attacks are first categorized and explained with examples in this paper. We then propose a new image watermark attack called 'Pixel Reallocation Attack'. The proposed attack is a hybrid approach, which aims to decorrelate the embedded watermark with the original watermark. Since many watermarking detections are by correlating the testing image with the target watermark, it will not work once we decorrelate the embedded watermark. For example, the geometrical transformation attacks desynchronize the correlation detector with the testing image leading to detection failure. However, by inserting a template or grid into the watermarked image can make inverse transformation possible and the watermark can be retrieved. If we apply transformations to every single pixel locally, independently and randomly, inverse transformation will not be possible and the attack will be successful since the embedded watermark is not correlated with the original watermark. Experiment shows that single technique approach needs a larger distortion to the image in order to attack the image successfully. We also tested our attack with commercial watermarking software. It cannot detect the watermark after we applied the proposed hybrid attack to the watermarked image.