Skip to main content
  • Research Article
  • Open access
  • Published:

A Workbench for the BOWS Contest

Abstract

The first break our watermarking system (BOWS) contest challenged researchers to remove the watermark from three given images. Participants could submit altered versions of the images to an online detector. For a successful attack, the watermark had to be unreadable to this detector with a quality above 30 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio. We implemented our experiments in R, a language for statistical computing. This paper presents the BOWS package, an extension for R, along with examples for using this experimental environment. The BOWS package provides an offline detector for several platforms. Furthermore, the particular watermarking algorithm used in the contest is analysed. We show how to find single coefficient attacks and derive high-quality images (62.6 dB PSNR) with full knowledge of the key.

[12345678910]

References

  1. ECRYPT : Network of excellence in cryptology. 2006. http://www.ecrypt.eu.orghttp://www.ecrypt.eu.org

    Google Scholar 

  2. ECRYPT : BOWS, break our watermarking system. 2006. http://lci.det.unifi.it/BOWShttp://lci.det.unifi.it/BOWS

    Google Scholar 

  3. Westfeld A: Lessons from the BOWS Contest. Proceedings of the Multimedia and Security Workshop 2006 (MM and Sec'06), September 2006, Geneva, Switzerland 2006: 208-213.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Westfeld A: Tackling BOWS with the sensitivity attack. In Proceedings of Security, Steganography and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IX, January-February 2007, San Jose, Calif, USA, Proceedings of SPIE Edited by: Delp EJ III, Won PW. 6505:

    Google Scholar 

  5. Cox IJ, Linnartz J-PMG: Public watermarks and resistance to tampering. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP '97), January 1997, Santa Barbara, Calif, USA 3: 3-6.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Comesaña P, Pérez-Freire L, Pérez-González F: The blind newton sensitivity attack. Proceedings of The International Society for Optical Engineering, 2006, Proceedings of SPIE 6072: 149-160.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Miller ML, Doërr GJ, Cox IJ: Applying informed coding and embedding to design a robust high-capacity watermark. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2004, 13(6):792-807. 10.1109/TIP.2003.821551

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Comesaña P, Pérez-González F: Two different approaches for attacking BOWS. In Proceedings of The International Society for Optical Engineering, January 2007, San Jose, Calif, USA, Proceedings of SPIE Edited by: Delp EJ III, Wong PW. 6505:

    Google Scholar 

  9. Craver S, Atakli I, Yu J: How we broke the BOWS watermark. In Proceedings of The International Society for Optical Engineering, January 2007, San Jose, Calif, USA, Proceedings of SPIE Edited by: Delp EJ III, Wong PW. 6505:

    Google Scholar 

  10. Barni M, Piva A: Is knowledge of the watermarking algorithm useful for watermark removal? Proceedings of the 2nd Wavila Challenge, 2006, 2007 1-10.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andreas Westfeld.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Westfeld, A. A Workbench for the BOWS Contest. EURASIP J. on Info. Security 2007, 064521 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/64521

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/64521

Keywords