Title: Distortion-free fragile watermark for relational databases

Authors: Ibrahim Kamel; Maha AlaaEddin; Waheeb Yaqub; Kareem Kamel

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE ' Department of Computing and Information Science, Masdar Institute, Abu-Dhabi, UAE ' University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093, USA

Abstract: Unauthorised changes to databases may result in significant losses for organisations. Digital watermarking can be used for protecting the integrity of relational databases. Prior techniques introduce distortions to the watermarked attributes and thus limit their application. This paper, on the other hand, proposes a distortion-free watermarking mechanism for protecting the integrity of relational databases. The proposed technique establishes a one-to-one relationship between the secret watermark and the relative order of tuples in a group. Alterations by attackers, who do not know the secret watermark, will disturb the secret order and thus destroy the existing fragile watermark. We carried out extensive simulation experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. The experiments showed that 100% detection rate can be achieved by increasing the group size. Moreover, if the number of attacks is limited to one, the proposed technique can identify, with high probability, the attacked attribute and the type of attack.

Keywords: data integrity; digital watermarking; relational databases; information security; distortion; fragile watermarks; tuples; simulation; attack detection.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBDI.2016.078410

International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, 2016 Vol.3 No.3, pp.190 - 201

Received: 05 Mar 2015
Accepted: 23 Sep 2015
Published online: 16 Aug 2016 *

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