Title: Security analysis of SVD-based watermarking techniques

Authors: Victor Pomponiu, Davide Cavagnino

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Torino, c.so Svizzera 185, 10149 Torino, Italy. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Torino, c.so Svizzera 185, 10149 Torino, Italy

Abstract: Digital watermarking is a widely adopted solution to ownership protection and authentication of multimedia contents, such as images and videos. In the last years, the well-known numerical tool called singular value decomposition (SVD) received much attention from the watermarking community. Many schemes showing good performances in terms of robustness, capacity and imperceptibility have been devised. However, few of these schemes take into consideration another crucial constraint, the security, which guarantees the usability of the watermarking technology. This paper shows that most of the watermarking schemes based on SVD are insecure and cannot be used for applications that require ownership protection and authentication. This is due to the fact that the space where the watermark resides, i.e., the embedding space, can be estimated and the watermark removed or overwritten. To motivate our findings, two different attacks that remove the watermark while minimising the distortion were developed. The attacks were employed on several test images, being able to remove the watermark with low distortions.

Keywords: digital watermarking; copyright protection; robustness; security; singular value decomposition; SVD; authentication; multimedia content; ownership protection; watermark removal; attacks; low distortion.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIS.2011.041362

International Journal of Multimedia Intelligence and Security, 2011 Vol.2 No.2, pp.120 - 145

Published online: 28 Feb 2015 *

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