Cryptanalysis of "Wavelet Tree Quantization" Watermarking Scheme

Here we study a recently proposed watermarking scheme based on “Wavelet Tree Quantization” (WTQ) which has been presented by Wang and Lin in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, February 2004. In the scheme, the wavelet coefficients corresponding to same spatial locations are grouped together. Two such groups, selected at random, are merged to form a super tree. Some of these super trees are quantized to embed the watermark signal in the image. In the process of cryptanalysis we can identify the groups which are quantized during watermark insertion process. We then select the non-quantized groups and quantize them to remove the watermark. Experimental results show that the watermark is completely removed by this attack. The cryptanalysis falls under cipher text only jamming attack which requires a single watermarked copy.

[1]  Subhamoy Maitra,et al.  Cryptanalysis of optimal differential energy watermarking (DEW) and a modified robust scheme , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

[2]  Alfred Menezes,et al.  Progress in Cryptology — INDOCRYPT 2002 , 2002, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[3]  Stephan Katzenbeisser,et al.  Information Hiding Techniques for Steganography and Digital Watermaking , 1999 .

[4]  Darko Kirovski,et al.  Embedding and detecting spread-spectrum watermarks under estimation attacks , 2002, 2002 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[5]  Subhamoy Maitra,et al.  Cryptanalysis of correlation-based watermarking schemes using single watermarked copy , 2004, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[6]  Darko Kirovski,et al.  Replacement Attack on Arbitrary Watermarking Systems , 2002, Digital Rights Management Workshop.

[7]  Jean-Paul M. G. Linnartz,et al.  Watermark estimation through detector analysis , 1998, Proceedings 1998 International Conference on Image Processing. ICIP98 (Cat. No.98CB36269).

[8]  Ross J. Anderson,et al.  Evaluation of copyright marking systems , 1999, Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems.

[9]  Yuan-Pei Lin,et al.  Wavelet tree quantization for copyright protection watermarking , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[10]  Ramarathnam Venkatesan,et al.  Cryptanalysis of Discrete-Sequence Spread Spectrum Watermarks , 2002, Information Hiding.

[11]  Stéphane Mallat,et al.  A Theory for Multiresolution Signal Decomposition: The Wavelet Representation , 1989, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[12]  Markus G. Kuhn,et al.  Attacks on Copyright Marking Systems , 1998, Information Hiding.

[13]  Joe Kilian,et al.  A Note on the Limits of Collusion-Resistant Watermarks , 1999, EUROCRYPT.

[14]  Ross J. Anderson,et al.  On the limits of steganography , 1998, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[15]  Reginald L. Lagendijk,et al.  Optimal differential energy watermarking of DCT encoded images and video , 2001, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[16]  Thierry Pun,et al.  Cryptographic Copyright Protection for Digital Images Based on Watermarking Techniques , 1999, Theor. Comput. Sci..

[17]  Jacques Stern,et al.  Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT ’99 , 1999, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[18]  Julien P. Stern,et al.  An Analysis of One of the SDMI Candidates , 2001, Information Hiding.