Title: Obfuscation in digital fingerprinting

Authors: Hans Georg Schaathun; Minoru Kuribayashi

Addresses: Department of ICT and Natural Sciences, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Pb 1517, N-6025 Ålesund, Norway ' Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Okayama, 700-8530, Japan

Abstract: Digital fingerprinting has been much studied in the literature for more than 20 years, motivated by applications in copyright protection. A popular and practical approach is to use spread spectrum watermarking to embed fingerprints in multimedia objects. Solutions are normally only validated against known attacks in simulation. In this paper, we review known attacks on spread spectrum fingerprinting and give a mathematical argument for the efficacy of the so-called moderated minority extreme (MMX) attack. We also provide a new, mathematical description the obfuscation technique which we proposed at ICIP 2015, identifying some key properties which are necessary to resist the MMX and other attacks.

Keywords: coding theory; collusion-secure code; copyright protection; digital fingerprinting; signal processing; spread spectrum; watermarking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICOT.2017.083845

International Journal of Information and Coding Theory, 2017 Vol.4 No.2/3, pp.185 - 200

Received: 21 Nov 2016
Accepted: 29 Nov 2016
Published online: 24 Apr 2017 *

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