Watermill: An Optimized Fingerprinting System for Databases under Constraints

• Published in: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering Vol. 20; no. 4; pp. 532 - 546
• Main Authors: Lafaye, J., Gross-Amblard, D., Constantin, C., Guerrouani, M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.04.2008; IEEE Computer Society; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Algorithm design and analysis; Algorithms; Applied sciences; Computation; Computer programs; Computer Science; Computer science; control theory; systems; Constraint optimization; Data processing. List processing. Character string processing; database fingerprinting; database watermarking; Detection algorithms; Exact sciences and technology; Fingerprint recognition; Fingerprinting; Information systems. Data bases; Integer linear programming; Integers; Linear programming; Memory and file management (including protection and security); Memory organisation. Data processing; Open source software; optimization; Relational databases; Security and Privacy Protection; Software; Source code; Spatial databases; Strategy; Studies; Usability; Watermarking; Security and Privacy Protection; database watermarking; database fingerprinting; optimization; Constrained database; Collusion; Fingerprint; Declarative language; Probabilistic approach; Database query; Relational database; Constraint satisfaction; Linear programming; Stéganography; linear optimization; query optimizations; relational databases; Open source software; Constrained optimization; Integer programming; Fingerprinting; Heuristic method; Robustness; Safety; Usability; Digital watermarking
• DOI: 10.1109/TKDE.2007.190713
• ISSN: 1041-4347

This paper presents a walermarking/fingerprinting system for relational databases. It features a built-in declarative language to specify usability constraints that watermarked data sets must comply with. For a subset of these constraints, namely, weight-independent constraints, we propose a novel watermarking strategy that consists of translating them into an integer linear program. We show two watermarking strategies: an exhaustive one based on integer linear programming constraint solving and a scalable pairing heuristic. Fingerprinting applications, for which several distinct watermarks need to be computed, benefit from the reduced computation time of our method that precomputes the watermarks only once. Moreover, we show that our method enables practical collusion-secure fingerprinting since the precomputed watermarks are based on binary alterations located at exactly the same positions. The paper includes an in-depth analysis of false-hit and false-miss occurrence probabilities for the detection algorithm. Experiments performed on our open source software WATERMILL assess the watermark robustness against common attacks and show that our method outperforms the existing ones concerning the watermark embedding speed.