How we broke the BOWS watermark

Scott Craver; Idris Atakli; Jun Yu

doi:10.1117/12.704376

27 February 2007 How we broke the BOWS watermark

Scott Craver, Idris Atakli, Jun Yu

Proceedings Volume 6505, Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IX; 65051C (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.704376
Event: Electronic Imaging 2007, 2007, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

From December 2005 to March of 2006, the Break Our Watermarking System (BOWS) contest challenged researchers to break an image watermark of unknown design. The attacked images had to possess a minimum quality level of 30 dB PSNR, and the winners would be those of highest average quality over three images. Our research team won this challenge, employing the strategy of reverse-engineering the watermark before any attempts to attack it in earnest. We determined the frequency transform, sub-band, and an exploitable quirk in the detector that made it sensitive to noise spikes. Of interest is our overall methodology of reverse-engineering through severe false alarms, and we introduce a new concept, "superrobustness," which despite its positive name is a security flaw.

Citation Download Citation

Scott Craver, Idris Atakli, and Jun Yu "How we broke the BOWS watermark", Proc. SPIE 6505, Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IX, 65051C (27 February 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.704376

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