Impacts of Watermarking Security on Tardos-Based Fingerprinting

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information forensics and security Vol. 8; no. 6; pp. 1038 - 1050
• Main Authors: Mathon, B., Bas, P., Cayre, F., Macq, B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.06.2013; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Active fingerprinting; Applied sciences; Computer information security; Computer Science; Computer science; control theory; systems; Decoding; Distortion; Engineering Sciences; Estimation error; Exact sciences and technology; Fingerprint recognition; Fingerprinting; Information, signal and communications theory; Memory and file management (including protection and security); Memory organisation. Data processing; Network security; Radiocommunications; Robustness; Security; Signal and communications theory; Signal and Image processing; Signal representation. Spectral analysis; Signal, noise; Software; spread-spectrum; Strategy; Studies; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Watermarking; spread-spectrum; Estimation error; Probabilistic approach; Error estimation; Interlacing; Worst case method; Symbol; Error rate; Active fingerprinting; Stéganography; Decoding; Binary code; watermarking; security; Efficiency; Robustness; Spread spectrum; Computer security; Digital watermarking; Security; Spread-spectrum; Active Fingerprinting; Watermarking
• ISSN: 1556-6013; 1556-6021
• DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2013.2260158

This paper presents a study of the embedding of Tardos binary fingerprinting codes with watermarking techniques. By taking into account the security of the embedding scheme, we present a new approach for colluding strategies which relies on the possible estimation error rate of the code symbols (denoted ∈). We derive a new attack strategy called " ∈-Worst Case Attack" and show its efficiency using the computation of achievable rates for simple decoding. Then we consider the interplay between security and robustness regarding the accusation performances of the fingerprinting scheme and show that 1) for the same accusation rate secure schemes can afford to be less robust than insecure ones, and 2) that secure schemes enable to cast the Worst Case Attack into an interleaving attack. Additionally, we use the security analysis of the watermarking scheme to derive from ∈ a security attack for a fingerprinting scheme based on Tardos codes and a new scheme called stochastic spread-spectrum watermarking. We compare a removal attack against an AWGN robustness attack and we show that for the same distortion, the combination of a fingerprinting attack and a security attack easily outperform classical attacks even with a small number of observations.