The dbMark: A benchmarking system for watermarking methods for relational databases

Digital technology keeps falling prey to the ease with which the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of digital objects can be achieved. Research on copyright protection of digital data must counterbalance the failures of legal measures against digital piracy. Digital watermarking tops the list of technical countermeasures and recent research has focused on proposing watermarking methods for relational data as well as on the types of attacks which aim at removing or destroying the watermark. With the database field of research in urgent need of developing tools and platforms for the benchmarking of these watermarking methods, the present work has undertaken to construct a benchmarking system for the automatic evaluation and fair comparison of watermarking schemes for relational data. The new software tool is called dbMark and its construction has taken into consideration the characteristics of a large set of parameters across a wide range of database watermarking applications. This article presents and comments upon the results of several experiments that evaluate the performance of three different watermarking methods taking into consideration several parameters and types of attacks. There are indications that the dbMark can be used effectively as the primary platform for the experimental evaluation of watermarking methods for relational data. The source code and the executable file of the dbMark are provided free-of-charge on the Web.