Dynamic reversible data hiding for relational database using attribute value ordering

Abstract

As an essential medium for information storage, databases often need to be shared and transferred. At the same time, databases are threatened by privacy leakage such as piracy, illegal copying, and tampering. Consequently, reversible data hiding (RDH) for the database is designed as a solution to meet the need of copyright protection and tracking. Many RDH algorithms for database have been proposed recently, but the trade-off between the embedding capacity and the embedding distortion is still unsatisfactory. To remedy this, we propose a low-distortion RDH method for relational database by using attribute value ordering to fully exploit the inner and inter correlations among the attributes. We sort the tuples according to the order of the numerical attribute values and embed the message bits by modifying the maximum/minimum values. To achieve better embedding performance, the database is split into multiple groups, and each group is dynamically embedded with secret data using attribute value ordering. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve a large embedding capacity with relatively low distortion compared to the state-of-the-art methods.