A robust scheme for securing relational data incremental watermarking

Abstract

Watermarking techniques aim to protect relational databases by embedding on them a copyright signal known as the watermark without imposing additional restrictions. However, unlike other digital assets, such as multimedia data, relational data are often subject to frequent updates that may dramatically compromise the quality of the embedded watermark. Hence, it is relevant to implement incremental watermarking for this type of data. Although incremental watermarking is defined in theory as the requirement of generating and inserting a mark whenever data is inserted or updated in a watermarked database (if the new value requires marking), its practical deployment is often ignored in the validation of proposed techniques, possibly due to how its deployment affects other requirements, such as the public system and security. In this work, we present different architectural approaches that, rather than conflicting with security and the public system, are built upon and contribute to them. The experimental results validate their applicability in terms of deployment, portability, scalability, and performance. As an architectural proposal, our work can be applied to different watermarking techniques, regardless of their particularities and the protected databases, making the preservation and enhancement of the watermark possible. Thus, we face the silent threats to security posed by opportunistic malicious operations in the absence of incremental watermarking.