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Reverse-Engineering a Watermark Detector Using an Oracle

Abstract

The Break Our Watermarking System (BOWS) contest gave researchers three months to defeat an unknown watermark, given three marked images and online access to a watermark detector. The authors participated in the first phase of the contest, defeating the mark while retaining the highest average quality among attacked images. The techniques developed in this contest led to general methods for reverse-engineering a watermark algorithm via experimental images fed to its detector. The techniques exploit the tendency of watermark algorithms to admit characteristic false positives, which can be used to identify an algorithm or estimate certain parameters.

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Correspondence to Scott Craver or Jun Yu.

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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.

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Craver, S., Atakli, I. & Yu, J. Reverse-Engineering a Watermark Detector Using an Oracle. EURASIP J. on Info. Security 2007, 043034 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/43034

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/43034

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